In 2026 CIRCPACK led a joint engagement with FEFCO — the European Federation of Corrugated Board Manufacturers — and AAK, the Swedish specialty-oils brand owner, to test what PPWR readiness looks like when buyer and supplier work to a shared regulatory roadmap rather than negotiating compliance contract by contract. The engagement ran 10 weeks and covered the corrugated secondary packaging used across AAK's European portfolio.
The starting point
PPWR Article 6 grades packaging on recyclability classes A, B and C, with the toughest thresholds biting from 2028. Corrugated packaging starts from a strong baseline — fibre-based, well-collected, well-sorted across the EU-27 — but the detail matters: inks, coatings, adhesives and on-pack labels all materially affect the class outcome. For a specialty-oils buyer like AAK, who ships into a dozen European markets with different EPR regimes, the cost of getting that detail wrong compounds quickly.
A shared roadmap, not a contract negotiation
The novel piece of this engagement was procedural. Most PPWR readiness work runs inside a single company: a brand owner audits its portfolio, then pushes findings back up the supply chain. Here, FEFCO and AAK shared the same scoping room from day one. CIRCPACK built one assessment that covered both sides of the relationship — corrugated converter constraints alongside brand-owner regulatory exposure — so the trade-offs were visible to everyone simultaneously.
What the assessment surfaced
CIRCPACK ran operational sorting tests across MRFs in Germany, the Netherlands and France, lab tests on the dominant ink and adhesive systems, and a desk study against the relevant national EPR schemes. The combined output identified four specific design changes — two adhesive substitutions, one ink reformulation, one label-removal protocol — that moved every AAK SKU in scope to a defensible Class A under Article 6.
Because the work was scoped jointly, FEFCO converters could pre-validate the new adhesive and ink systems against their production lines before AAK committed to the redesign. No mid-programme renegotiation, no surprise reprocessing cost.
Why it generalises
The corrugated-with-AAK pattern is a model for any category where a brand owner buys from a small number of structural suppliers and where PPWR Article 6 pressure is concentrated on a handful of design choices. CIRCPACK has since reused the joint-scoping pattern with a primary-plastics converter and a household-care buyer; the second engagement compressed to 8 weeks because both sides recognised the template.
For brand owners reading this: if your packaging exposure is concentrated in 2-3 structural supplier relationships, a joint-scoping engagement is usually faster, cheaper and more durable than running parallel internal audits. Talk to an expert to scope a comparable engagement.