Blog · 2026-08-30
What a packaging data sheet actually costs
Not the regulation — the retyping. A buyer emails a packaging data sheet, then another, then the EPR kilograms live in a third file. What answering it twice costs, counted rather than guessed.
The first letter is rarely a ministry. It is a spreadsheet from the brand above you, with a name in the filename: packaging data sheet, packaging questionnaire, material declaration. Fill it in by Friday.
That is true of the first one. It is not true of the second.
What follows is not an argument against the sheet. It is a way to put a number on what answering it actually costs, using your own figures rather than a vendor's.
What a packaging data sheet is
A packaging data sheet is a table a buyer emails down the chain. Each row is one component the product travels in — the pallet, the film, the corners, the strap. Each column is something their template happens to name: recycled content, weight per unit, country of production, composition, the claim printed on the incoming board.
It is not a new job. It is a description of packaging you already buy. The expensive part is that the description is asked for in someone else's columns, and then asked for again.
Cost one · typed into their template
Take one product. Count how many cells a person fills by hand the first time the sheet arrives. In most workshops the answer is not the twenty columns the template shows. It is the four they actually know, plus a walk to the warehouse for a weight, plus an email to a supplier for the rest.
Forty minutes is a common first pass. Nobody books it. It sits between other things, like the four-minute retyping of an order.
Cost two · the second customer, different columns
The next brand sends their own file. Recycled content is now two columns instead of one. Country of production has moved. The pallet that was a row is now a note.
If the first sheet still exists, somebody copies. Copying is how a weight becomes a total, and a total becomes a per-unit figure that was never weighed. The second sheet takes less time than the first and is more likely to be wrong.
Cost three · the EPR file is another workbook
Kilograms placed on the market are a different cut of the same packaging. Country, material, business or end consumer. Expanded polystyrene has its own rate and must not disappear into “plastic”. A pallet that comes back is not placed on the market a second time — and each country treats that its own way.
In a spreadsheet this is a third file. It disagrees with the data sheet because nothing forces them to agree. Month end is when somebody notices.
The EU Packaging Regulation — PPWR, Regulation (EU) 2025/40 — has applied since 12 August 2026. Registration is national, often with no minimum quantity. The regulation did not invent the buyer's sheet. It made the third file mandatory, and left the first two as they were.
Cost four · a declaration that cannot move
Whoever places packaging on the market under their own name draws up an EU declaration of conformity — Article 39, model in Annex VIII — against Articles 5 to 12. If you only buy your packaging, this is not your job: you hold your supplier's declaration instead.
The expensive version is a PDF written in March. In June the catalogue weight changes. The PDF does not. A customer still holds March.
What the spreadsheet is genuinely good for
The first sheet. One buyer, one product, a kitchen scale, an honest blank where you have not measured. A grid is the right tool for that, and no software should be bought to replace a morning's work.
The trouble starts when the sheet quietly becomes the record: when the second customer arrives, and the EPR file, and the declaration, and there is still one truth, sitting in email.
Put your own number on it
Three questions, answerable this week.
How many buyer templates you filled last year, and how long the second one took compared with the first.
How many hours went into last year's packaging kilograms — the EPR cut — from first cell to the figure you filed.
How many times a weight on a sheet and a weight in the EPR file were not the same number.
If the number is small, keep the sheets. That is a legitimate answer.
If it is not small, the useful question is not which program to buy. It is whether the data sheet, the kilograms and the declaration are allowed to be three files, or whether they have to be three cuts of the same catalogue.
One catalogue, three cuts
Tarafex is the second of those. A Vivifex product. It holds each packaging item once — material, the weight of one unit, where that weight came from — and writes the buyer's table, the declaration of conformity, and the kilograms per country from that record. It does not register you in any country, does not pay a scheme, and does not tick a box on the declaration for you.
If you have only ever filled one sheet, you do not need it. If you have filled the second, you already know the cost.
Tell us how many templates landed last year. We will say honestly whether it is worth building.