Extended producer responsibility, or EPR, is the principle that the businesses which put packaging on the market should carry more of the cost of dealing with it afterward, and how that cost is charged is the sharp end of the packaging-reform debate this masthead follows. APCO, the industry body that runs the packaging stewardship scheme, had proposed moving producers onto a new fee structure built around an EPR fee. On its own account, that is not happening this year.
What APCO has decided
In APCO’s words, “the proposed EPR fee model will not be introduced in FY27”, and the “new ‘base fee + EPR fee’ structure will not be implemented next year”. Instead, it says, “FY27 fees will continue to be calculated using the current turnover-based model”. In plain terms, a business that pays to be part of the scheme is charged this year the way it was last year, on turnover, rather than on any new packaging-based fee. For the financial year that started on 1 July, the practical answer for producers is that nothing about how they are charged has changed.
Why it was held back
The reasons APCO gives for pausing are about getting the design right rather than abandoning it. It points to the need for regulatory certainty and a pathway that avoids duplication and confusion, for a model that is practical, fair and delivers results, and for a fee that is proportionate and reflects real-world packaging realities. It also frames the delay around stronger governance and the time the industry needs to build capability and transition. Read together, that is a body choosing not to switch on a new charging system before the rules it has to sit inside are settled, which, with a separate government push toward mandatory packaging regulation also in train, is a defensible instinct.
The pathway it is on instead
The deferral is not a retreat from EPR but a slower approach to it. APCO has set out a three-year transition pathway toward a regulated, industry-led EPR scheme, an approach it confirmed alongside board changes at its 2025 annual general meeting and carries into its FY26 to FY27 business plan. The sequence on its own record runs from the 2030 Strategic Plan released in August 2024, through a member consultation across April and May 2025, to the revised approach set out from July 2025, with the current fee structure held in place for now. The direction is a regulated scheme; the timing is the thing that keeps moving.
Our read
This is not a fresh announcement so much as the settled state of play for the year now beginning, and it is worth stating plainly because the reform’s headlines can make it sound closer than the invoicing is. For a packaging producer planning FY27, the operative fact is simple: the fee model has not changed, and the new EPR-based charge is not landing this year. Our read, and we label it as ours, is that the gap between the reform’s loud direction and its quiet timeline is the story to watch. EPR is coming, on the industry’s own pathway and, separately, under a government reform push; but the moment it starts costing producers real money on a packaging basis keeps being pushed out, and each deferral is a year in which the incentive to redesign packaging for that future stays softer than the rhetoric suggests. We will track the pathway against its own dates and report when the fee model actually arrives.