At Morrama we are focusing on 5 key opportunities from a design perspective that will put brands in a good place for meeting regulatory requirements and reducing fees:
Shifting to monomaterial (helps meet pEPR and PPWR requirements)
Improving material separation and identification (helps meet pEPR and PPWR requirements)
Lightweighting (reduces UK PPT and pEPR fees)
Refillable (reduces UK PPT and pEPR fees assuming the refill is lighter weight)
Reusable (you only pay the PPT and pEPR fees on the first rotation)
1. Shifting to monomaterial
The dream for recycling is that packaging is mono-material and, of course, recyclable. The most challenging formats for switching to monomaterial are flexibles, or packaging with a mechanism such as a pump, twist or hinge.
When it comes to pumps, most of the leading packaging suppliers including Reike, Berry and Aptar offer mono-material solutions, although they are still only a small percentage of their catalogues.
Flexibles are a challenge because the idea of multiple laminate layers is that each provides a barrier for something - UV, moister, air - and so maintaining performance in monomaterial is obviously a challenge. To get around this companies will apply a coating, often an EVOH or metal-oxide layer that is so thin it doesn’t impact the recycling process. So whilst it’s not strictly mono-material, it can be recycled as PP or LDPE depending on the pack. There is still the question of how these are collected, as flexible packaging is currently not curbside recyclable in the UK, but this is set to change in 2027. This roadmap on flexible packaging recycling by WRAP is a useful resource.
Lastly there is the beauty packaging such as compacts or lipsticks with hinges or mechanisms. Companies such as Toly have mono-material PET solutions to compacts and Albea have tried and tested mono-PET lipstick solutions. Away from plastic, HCP and PPK have developed mono-material aluminium twist-up packaging. And Verity also has a catalogue of aluminium packaging solutions.
One of the bigger challenges with ensuring recyclability at scale is to do with coatings. Hot stamping with foil, laminated labels, silicone coatings or UV-printed graphics can all introduce contamination. There are some innovations in water-based inks and, if plastic, in-mould labelling (IML) is a great option if your supplier has the capabilities. Steer away from PVD coatings often applied to plastics to make them look like metal, these are a big contaminant.
2. Improving material separation…
Whilst mono-material is great from a recycling perspective, it’s not always feasible and for some brands the design and finish limitations are a deal-breaker. And so we need to be creative with how materials are separated.
This sounds simple in practice, but the beauty industry has long relied on bonding and snapping parts together, in part because of the size and complexity of some of the more technical packaging assemblies and in part due to the unwillingness to compromise on aesthetics.
So we need to shift our mindset. The Wild products are a great example where oversized reversible snap fixings can be un-done with a household item such as the back of a teaspoon, allowing the plastic and aluminium components to be separated by the customer before recycling. Whilst these features are clearly on-show, very few people would remember they were there if they were asked to describe the pack design from memory. And so will definitely be seeing more honest features like this on packaging in the future.
… and identification
When materials are separated, the next step is ensuring that they are correctly identified. Companies like Polytag have two methods of supporting brands with this, including their UV tags which are identified at MRFs (Material Recovery Facility) using a UV scanner. Digimarc is another technology that aims to do the same thing with almost invisible markings on the packaging that can be picked up by special cameras
Greyparrot takes identification to another level with their AI technology. Their cameras identified 43.5 billion individual packaging items in 2025 alone, feeding this data back to brands through their Deepnest platform to provide transparency on where packaging is ending up and how to improve recycling rates.
Having this data will be vital for those needing to prove ‘recyclability at scale’ to meet the PPWR requirements in 2035.
3. Lightweighting
Reducing weight means less taxes under both pEPR and PPT, although some companies have raised concerns over pEPR specifically causing more brands to switch away from materials such as glass and paper to plastic to reduce or avoid fees.
As a rule of thumb though, less packaging = less impact.
To start with it’s about removing anything unnecessary. And even a small reduction across millions of units mounts up. Actimel removed their labels from their yoghurt drink in 2023, stating a reduction of 22 tons of plastic annually as a result. Then it’s about reducing material use. One consideration is maintaining durability. Packaging is by nature designed to protect the product, so it needs to maintain performance. But, as it stands, much of the beauty packaging on the market could be run over with a 10 tonne truck and survive, so there is a lot of ‘heavy-weighting’ to be addressed. This brings us perhaps a bigger challenge - breaking the perception of heavy = premium. This is a particular challenge for an industry that spends much of its time leading customers to believe they are buying more than they actually are. Dressing 5ml of product up in a chunky glass jar that enlarges the perception of quantity and therefore value. The perfume industry is especially good at this.
This will take time to undo, but premium brands such as Chanel are showing that premium can also mean minimal. Another innovator in glass packaging is Diageo, with their open source experiments in extreme glass lightweighting helping to show just how much unnecessary weight there is in the drinks industry.
4. Refillable
Not to be confused with reusable (we will come to that), refillable packaging is where the user owns the packaging and can refill it, either at home or in-store, with the same or similar product over and over. This may take the form of a cartridge that is loaded into the packaging such as the Wild refill, or decanted in such as Prada refill. The idea here is that by having a premium primary pack but a lightweight refill you can maintain the perception and experience of your product whilst reducing impact (and fees) each time it is refilled.
Refillable packaging doesn’t grant you any exceptions to the regulations however, so even if you believe your packaging to be more like a product that people keep, it’s still considered packaging and needs to be recyclable, meet recycled content targets and be subject to PPT or pEPR fees.
5. Reusable
According to EU legislation this is the holy grail of packaging. The packaging that stays in the system and can be tracked and reused over and over. Think pallets, crates and plastic cups at festivals. The key here is that the ownership of the packaging doesn’t change hands. The company sells the product and, whilst the packaging may briefly be in the hands of the user consuming that product, it is then returned to the company for reconditioning (inspection, cleaning, washing, repair) and refilling. There must be a way for the company to trace the packaging through the system and know how many times it is being reused. And they must incentivise customers to return the packaging through something such as a deposit and return scheme.
Whilst the main incentives and requirements for reusable packaging are in transporting, there are initiatives in consumer markets. The Bower Collective’s BowerPack is a good example, where they use returnable pouches that are refilled and resold.
If you want support in reviewing your options, and exploring solutions that don’t compromise on user experience - reach out to us at info@morrama.com