The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR, Regulation (EU) 2025/40) becomes applicable on 12 August 2026. For most sustainability and facility teams, that date has felt distant, until now. With weeks rather than years remaining, the practical question has shifted from “what does PPWR require” to “what do we need to have in place by August.”
This is not a design or procurement problem alone. It is, first and foremost, a data problem — and for corporate offices specifically, per-floor granularity is what separates compliance from guesswork.
Start with an honest audit of what you already measure
Before adding anything new, map what your organization currently tracks:
- Do you know total waste volume by site, or only a single aggregated figure?
- Is data collected by weight, by estimate, or not at all?
- Can you say what percentage of waste is correctly sorted, or only that waste was “collected”?
- Is any of this data timestamped and exportable, or does it live in a spreadsheet someone updates manually once a month?
Most companies discover the same gap at this stage: they know how much waste leaves the building, but not what it consists of, where it came from, or how well it was sorted. That gap is exactly what PPWR reporting and EPR fee modulation will penalize.
Identify where EPR fee modulation will actually hit you
Extended Producer Responsibility fees under PPWR are not flat. They scale with recyclability, recycled content, and, increasingly, with demonstrated sorting performance. This means two buildings generating identical waste volumes can face different costs depending on data quality alone.
Before August, it’s worth running a simple internal exercise: for each site, estimate current sorting accuracy (even roughly) and model how fee modulation would apply at different quality bands. This won’t produce a precise number yet, but it will show finance and operations teams where the financial exposure sits, and which sites should be prioritized first.
Decide what level of granularity you actually need
PPWR reporting and CSRD disclosure both push toward auditable, verifiable data — not estimates. But “granular” doesn’t mean the same thing for every organization. Before selecting tools or processes, clarify what your reporting actually requires:
- Per-site totals, or per-floor and per-collection-point detail?
- A snapshot once a quarter, or continuous tracking that shows trend over time?
- Internal use only, or data that needs to survive external audit for CSRD?
Getting this wrong in either direction is costly: too little granularity and you can’t defend your numbers under audit; too much and you build infrastructure you don’t need yet.
Fix data collection before fixing reporting
It’s tempting to jump straight to building a reporting template or dashboard. But a polished report built on estimated or manually logged data doesn’t hold up under scrutiny — and PPWR-linked EPR fees are financial, not just reputational, exposure.
The more durable approach is to address collection first:
- Replace manual weighing and logging with automated capture at the collection point — sensors, image recognition, or both — so data is generated continuously rather than reconstructed after the fact.
- Tag data by location, not just by building. Floor-level and bin-level detail is what allows you to isolate which areas are driving contamination, rather than diluting the problem into a single average.
- Automate the sorting-quality calculation. Recycling quality — the percentage of waste correctly sorted — is the figure that most directly affects EPR costs. If this number is currently estimated rather than measured, it should be the first thing you fix.
Build the reporting layer only once collection is reliable
Once real-time, location-tagged data is flowing, reporting becomes a formatting exercise rather than a data-reconstruction one. At this stage, prioritize:
- Exportability — data structured for GRI 306, CSRD disclosures, and EPR documentation without manual reformatting.
- Time-series tracking — auditors and internal stakeholders increasingly want to see trajectory (is sorting quality improving quarter over quarter), not just a single point-in-time figure.
- Traceability down to the collection point — so that when a number is questioned, you can show exactly which floor or bin it came from.
Assign ownership before the deadline, not after
A recurring failure point isn’t technical — it’s organizational. Waste data often sits with facilities, while EPR and CSRD reporting sit with sustainability or finance. If nobody owns the handoff between “data is collected” and “data is reported,” gaps appear right when they matter most.
Before August 2026, clarify:
- Who is accountable for data accuracy at each site
- Who compiles it for CSRD and EPR submissions
- Who reviews it before it goes to an auditor or regulator
The window for preparation is closing, not gone
None of this requires waiting for perfect infrastructure. Companies that start now, auditing current data, prioritizing high-exposure sites, automating collection before reporting, will reach August 2026 with defensible numbers. Those that wait will be reconstructing months of estimates under time pressure, which is a considerably harder position to report from, let alone negotiate EPR fees from.
The regulation sets the deadline. The data infrastructure is what determines whether that deadline is a formality or a scramble.
See it in action
Everything described above, per-floor tagging, automated sorting-quality calculation, exportable time-series data, is exactly the kind of visibility NANDO’s monitoring solution is designed to provide as part of its full offering.
Take the interactive tour below to see how the dashboard works in practice, from the building-level map down to per-bin quality scores and the full data export table.
