by Serguey Shinder
Until 2023 the packaging around the things we sold was, as far as our systems knew, invisible. A product had a code, a description, a weight, dimensions for the lorries and a price. The cardboard box it came in, the plastic film around the pallet, the polystyrene in the corners and the steel strapping were simply part of the product, and nobody had ever needed to describe them separately.
Then the UK introduced extended producer responsibility for packaging. Businesses above a certain size that put packaging into the market, including anybody importing goods under their own brand, now have to report what that packaging is made of and how much of it there is, every six months. Since 2025 they also pay fees towards the cost of collecting and recycling the packaging that ends up in people's homes, and from this year those fees vary with how easily the packaging can be recycled.
We import about two thousand own-brand lines, mostly fixings, sealants, hand tools and plumbing parts. For each of them we suddenly needed to know the weight of cardboard, plastic, paper, wood and metal in every layer of packaging, from the blister pack to the outer carton to the pallet wrap. We had none of it. The first report was assembled by three people over two months from supplier emails, spec sheets in four languages and, for about three hundred lines, a set of kitchen scales in the buying office.
What I think this means for the next ten years is that packaging is becoming product data. Today it is a reporting obligation. Soon it will be a cost on every line, different for each material, large enough that it belongs in the margin calculation alongside freight and duty. And it will start to change buying decisions. Two near identical sealants from two suppliers are no longer the same price if one comes in a mixed plastic and card blister that cannot be recycled and the other in a plain carton.
We have started treating it that way. Packaging now has its own record in our product system, layer by layer, material by material, and a new own-brand line cannot be set up without it. Our supplier agreements require that data, measured, not estimated, and require suppliers to tell us before they change a pack. Buyers see the expected packaging fee next to the landed cost when they compare quotes. And last quarter we asked three suppliers to redesign their packs, which is the first time in my career packaging has been a reason to change anything.
The box was always part of what we sold. Soon it will have a price of its own.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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