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Packaging EPR Is Changing Your Cartons. Has Anyone Told Your Conveyor?

MJE Team
3d
5 min read

From April 2026, the fees UK producers pay under Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging stopped being a flat rate per tonne and started depending on how recyclable the packaging actually is. Packaging is now assessed under the Recyclability Assessment Methodology, given a red, amber or green rating, and charged accordingly. Red-rated packaging pays a premium over amber. Green-rated packaging gets a discount.

Nearly all of the coverage of this has been written for compliance officers, finance teams and sustainability leads, which makes sense, because they are the ones who get the invoice. What almost nobody has written is the version for production managers and line engineers, who are the people who will actually have to run whatever the packaging team specifies next.

That gap matters, because a change in packaging format is not a paperwork exercise. It is a change to the physical object moving down your line, and your line was designed around the old one.


What actually changed, in one section


Fees are now modulated by recyclability. Packaging gets a red, amber or green rating under RAM, based on whether the material is widely collected at kerbside, whether existing infrastructure can sort it, whether it can be reprocessed into decent quality recyclate, and whether there is a genuine end market for that recyclate.

The gap between red and green widens over time. PackUK's published modulation policy set red-rated packaging at 20% above the amber fee in the first modulated year, with green sitting below it. The multiplier applied to red-rated material is scheduled to escalate in subsequent years, so the cost of a hard-to-recycle format grows rather than settling.

Unassessed packaging defaults to red. This is the detail that catches people out. If a format has not been assessed under RAM, it is treated as the worst case, not the average case.

Fees are charged per tonne. Which means lightweighting reduces cost directly and immediately, entirely separately from the recyclability rating. Two levers, not one.

Put those together and you get a fairly predictable set of packaging decisions. Producers move towards mono-material formats, drop problem components, and take weight out wherever they can. That is exactly what the policy was designed to do, and on the whole it is working as intended.

The operational consequences are a bit costly.


The four format changes that hit the line hardest (Infographic)


These are the packaging changes most likely to come out of an EPR review, and what each one does to material handling. 


Part 1 of Conveyor Belt packaging infographic

Part 1 of Conveyor Belt packaging infographic

Where this actually breaks on a conveyor


Four points, in rough order of how often they cause problems.

Accumulation back pressure crushes lighter cases. A gravity or line shaft roller section that queues cases against each other was sized for a case that could take the load. Take 15% of the board out and the same queue starts deforming corners and popping flaps. This is the single most common failure mode after a lightweighting exercise, and it usually gets blamed on the packaging supplier rather than the accumulation method. The fix is zero-pressure accumulation, where each zone stops independently rather than letting the whole queue lean on the front case. Driven roller conveyors are designed for exactly this, and it is why they have become standard in fulfilment environments handling mixed and fragile loads. The same thinking applies to handling fragile and irregular goods generally.

Smaller packs fall between rollers. The standard rule of thumb is that a package should always be supported by at least three rollers across its direction of travel. Shrink a carton to save material and you can quietly drop below that, at which point cases start to catch, tip or wedge. Roller pitch is fixed once it is installed. Package dimensions are not, and packaging teams rarely think to check the pitch before signing off a new size. If your formats are getting smaller or more varied, a belt conveyor section handles the range far more forgivingly than rollers do.

Unstable and irregular packs need a different surface entirely. Removing outer packaging, switching from shrink film to paper banding, or moving to a pouch format all reduce the stability of the item on the belt. Products that will not stand reliably need supporting rather than persuading, which is where a slat conveyor or a positively driven surface earns its place.

Buffering gets tighter. If a new format runs slower through the case packer, or needs an extra check, the imbalance has to go somewhere. A rotary accumulation table absorbs that at end of line without adding queue pressure, which matters more than it used to now that the cases themselves are weaker.

There is also a quieter one worth checking: any checkweigher or metal detection reject set against a known tare weight will need reconfiguring when the packaging weight changes. That is not strictly a conveyor issue, but it sits on the same line and it fails at the same time.


The honest version of the argument


None of this means EPR should trigger a capital project. In the first modulated year the difference between a red and a green rating is a premium of a fifth on the amber fee, and for a mid-sized producer that is a meaningful line on a budget rather than a crisis. Anyone telling you that modulated fees alone justify replacing an end-of-line system is selling something.

The real case is different, and it is about sequencing. Packaging changes are coming regardless, because procurement, sustainability and shipping costs are all pushing the same way and the fee escalation means the gap widens each year rather than closing. When that change lands, the line either handles it or it does not, and the cost of finding out is measured in downtime, damages and rework rather than in EPR fees. Discovering that your accumulation section crushes the new case is considerably more expensive than checking beforehand.

The practical move is unglamorous: before the new format is signed off, run the specification past whoever knows the line. Check the smallest planned dimension against roller pitch. Check tray colour against your sensor setup. Check case compression strength against your accumulation method. Most of that is a conversation and a tape measure, and it costs nothing.

Where it does turn into work, it is usually modular rather than wholesale. Swapping a gravity section for driven roller, adding a belt transfer at a problem point, retrofitting a rotary table. Modular and 24V systems have made that kind of targeted change a lot more realistic than it was ten years ago, and if you are weighing up what a change actually involves, our buyer's guide to installing and maintaining conveyor systems covers the ground properly.

EPR was written as an environmental policy and it is being read as a finance one. On the factory floor it is neither. It is a specification change with a date attached, and the lines that cope with it will be the ones where somebody thought about the conveyor before the packaging was signed off rather than after.

Changing packaging formats and not sure how your line will handle it? Talk to the MJE Projects team about your existing setup, or see our conveyors for packaging range for how systems are configured around specific formats.



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