UK: Retained Food-Contact Law, and the Two Tests That Decide If You Owe EPR Fees

The UK retained EU food-contact law after Brexit and runs its own packaging EPR. Both a turnover test and a tonnage test must be met before fees apply.

British buyers sometimes assume that leaving the European Union simplified the compliance position for imported packaging. On food contact it largely did not, because the law was retained rather than replaced. On packaging waste it created something genuinely separate, with its own thresholds and its own reporting, and those thresholds are worth understanding precisely because they are conjunctive: two tests both have to be met before the obligation bites. A buyer who assumes they are obligated when they are not spends money unnecessarily, and one who assumes the opposite has an unreported liability.

Food contact: retained law, same substance

The Materials and Articles in Contact with Food (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 amended the earlier national regulations and retained the EU food-contact legislation, and Regulation (EC) No 1935/2004 was retained in UK law through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. The substantive requirement is therefore familiar: packaging that touches food must not release chemicals into it at levels that could harm health, change the food's composition, or affect its taste or smell. For a supplier, that means the technical file a UK customer needs looks much like the one a German or Dutch customer needs, which is a genuine convenience when supplying both.

The practical caution is divergence over time. Retained law is a starting point, not a permanent guarantee of alignment, and the UK is free to amend its own version. A supplier serving both the UK and the EU should therefore not assume indefinitely that one document set satisfies both, and should date and reference its test reports precisely so that they remain interpretable if the two regimes drift. As always for a woven bag, the evidence has to describe the layer in contact with the food rather than the outer weave, and it does not transfer between constructions.

Packaging EPR: both tests, not either test

If your business supplies packaged goods in the UK, whether you manufacture, import, fill or brand that packaging, you are likely to have obligations under packaging extended producer responsibility. The thresholds are the part to read carefully. A large producer is a business with annual turnover of two million pounds or more that supplies or imports more than fifty tonnes of packaging into the UK in a year. A small producer is generally a business with turnover between one million and two million pounds that supplies more than twenty-five tonnes. Both conditions have to be satisfied, the turnover test and the tonnage test, for a business to be obligated. A high-turnover business with little packaging is not caught by the tonnage limb, and a packaging-heavy business below the turnover floor is not caught either.

As an importer you are responsible for reporting the weight and material of the imported packaging and for paying any applicable fees, and that includes the primary packaging on the product as well as any secondary shipping materials. For a woven packaging buyer this creates a distinction that has to be handled correctly in the data. If you import empty bags and fill them, those bags become the primary packaging of your own product. The pallets, film and cartons in which the empty bags travelled are separate materials with their own weights. Both have to be captured, by material, and the figures have to be real, which means asking your supplier for actual packing weights rather than reconstructing them later from a delivery note.

What this does to the specification conversation

Once packaging weight has a direct cost attached to it, specification stops being purely a performance question. Every additional gram of fabric per bag becomes a small recurring fee as well as a small recurring material cost, which means over-specifying GSM out of caution is no longer free. That is not an argument for under-specifying, because a bag that fails costs vastly more than the fee ever will. It is an argument for specifying on evidence: filled weight, drop-test performance at that weight, stack height, and the number of handling events, rather than a round number chosen for comfort.

It also raises the value of a mono-material construction. A woven polypropylene bag with polypropylene lamination is a single-polymer article and is materially easier to place in a recycling stream than a mixed-polymer laminate, which matters both for reporting and for the recyclability expectations that retailers now impose alongside the statutory rules. Where print quality permits it, keeping the construction single-polymer is usually the better long-run position, and where it does not, the trade-off should at least be made deliberately.

Food contact

Retained 1935/2004 applies; evidence must name the contact layer and food category

Watch for divergence

Date and reference test reports so they stay interpretable if UK and EU rules drift

EPR test

Turnover AND tonnage; both limbs must be met

Report

Weight and material of primary product packaging and secondary shipping materials

Ask the supplier for

Actual packing weights by material, not estimates

Specify on evidence

Filled weight, drop performance, stack height, handling events

On the lines themselves, UK demand concentrates in a few places. A laminated sugar sack and an animal feed sack account for much of the agricultural and processing volume, both barrier constructions with a named contact layer. A custom printed bag is the retail-facing option, and it is where the retailer's own packaging standard, including its recyclability position, usually bites hardest. Where print quality is the priority, a printed PP woven roll is the construction that carries it, at the cost of a mixed-polymer laminate that is harder to place in a recycling stream.