Articles / EPR packaging data without the spreadsheet fortnight
Article · 24 February 2026
EPR packaging data without the spreadsheet fortnight
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is the packaging rule that turned a recycling levy into a data problem. Roughly: over £1 million turnover and 25 tonnes of packaging handled a year, you're reporting packaging data; over £2 million and 50 tonnes, you're reporting in more detail, more often, and paying fees on every tonne. The next data return is due by 1 April.
Why it hurts
The return wants weights: by material, by packaging type, by what you did with it. Your sales system knows exactly which products went out the door. What nobody ever recorded is that product X-1042 ships in 340 grams of corrugate, 12 grams of film and a 6-gram label. So the first return gets built by someone with a set of scales and a fortnight, and, because nothing was saved anywhere sensible, the next one gets built the same way. Meanwhile the fees (the first invoices went out in late 2025) are weighted by material, so guessed numbers cost real money in both directions.
The boring fix
Record the packaging against the product, once, in the system you already run. Unleashed and Katana both take custom fields or a linked table; so does almost anything with a product list. After that the return is arithmetic: sales quantities joined to packaging weights, grouped by material. We build the join and the report; the next return takes an afternoon, and most of the afternoon is tea.
The same table quietly answers the purchasing question ("what do we actually spend on corrugate?") that nobody could answer before.
What it takes
The plumbing is usually a few days. The real work is the first pass of weighing and recording, which you'd be doing anyway; the difference is doing it once.
Before you ring us
Under the thresholds? Do nothing. And if your packaging is three box sizes from one supplier, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine; the plumbing pays for itself when the product list runs to hundreds and the returns keep coming round.
Staring down a 1 April return?
A first conversation costs nothing.