Recycled Content: Proving What a Product Is Made Of

“Contains 30% recycled material” is a claim. The market is starting to ask: prove it. EU law is turning recycled content from a marketing line into a number that must be calculated, documented and verified — per battery model, per manufacturing plant, per year; per packaging type and format, averaged per plant and year. Three regimes converge: a percentage without a method, a unit of calculation and evidence is not compliance. It is a declaration to be checked.

Batteries: disclose first, then meet minimum shares

Article 8 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 works in two steps. First, disclosure: from 18 August 2028 or 24 months after the methodology delegated act enters into force, whichever is the latest, industrial batteries above 2 kWh (except those with exclusively external storage), electric vehicle batteries and SLI batteries containing cobalt, lead, lithium or nickel in active materials must be accompanied by documentation stating the percentage share of cobalt, lithium and nickel recovered from battery manufacturing waste or post-consumer waste, and of lead recovered from waste — for each battery model, per year and per manufacturing plant. For LMT batteries the disclosure duty applies from 18 August 2033. By 18 August 2026 the Commission must adopt the delegated act establishing the methodology for calculation and verification and the format for that documentation.

Then, minimum shares. From 18 August 2031, the technical documentation must demonstrate, in active materials, at least 16% cobalt, 85% lead, 6% lithium and 6% nickel recovered as above. From 18 August 2036 — when LMT batteries join the scope — the shares rise to 26% cobalt, 85% lead, 12% lithium and 15% nickel. Batteries already placed on the market before preparation for re-use, repurposing or remanufacturing are outside these paragraphs. And the source matters: battery manufacturing waste counts, while by-products re-used in production — manufacturing scrap that never became waste — do not.

Packaging: only post-consumer plastic counts

Article 7 of the PPWR, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, is stricter about the source: the content must be recovered from post-consumer plastic waste. By 1 January 2030 or three years after the Article 7(8) implementing act enters into force, whichever is the latest, any plastic part of packaging must contain, per packaging type and format in Annex II, calculated as an average per manufacturing plant and year:

• 30% for contact-sensitive packaging made from PET as the major component, except single-use plastic beverage bottles;
• 10% for contact-sensitive packaging made from other plastics, except single-use plastic beverage bottles;
• 30% for single-use plastic beverage bottles;
• 35% for other plastic packaging.

By 1 January 2040 those shares rise to 50%, 25%, 65% and 65% respectively. Article 7(3) adds chain conditions: the waste must have been collected in the Union under the applicable rules, or in a third country under equivalent separate-collection standards, and recycled in an installation meeting equivalent environmental conditions. Compliance must be demonstrated in the Annex VII technical information (Article 7(6)), and by 31 December 2026 the Commission must adopt the implementing acts for the calculation and verification methodology — a methodology that may include independent third-party audits (Article 7(8)). Exceptions exist, notably for certain medicinal and medical packaging, compostable packaging and dangerous-goods transport, and for plastic parts below 5% of a packaging unit — they are exceptions, not the rule.

ESPR: a product aspect, set group by group

The ESPR, Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, sets no single recycled-content percentage for all products — and any source that claims one is inventing it. What it does is name recycled content as a product aspect in Article 5(1)(k). Delegated acts under Article 4 can then set, for each product group, performance requirements under Article 6 — including minimum levels — and information requirements under Article 7. Article 5(12) closes the loop: ecodesign requirements shall be verifiable, and the Commission must identify appropriate means of verification, including direct checks of the product or checks on the basis of the technical documentation. The Working Plan 2025–2030 also foresees horizontal work on recycled content — a planning signal, not a deadline. The Digital Product Passport (Articles 9–11) is where that data will travel, tiered by access rights.

What counts — and what does not

• Source: post-consumer only under the PPWR; manufacturing waste or post-consumer waste for cobalt, lithium and nickel in batteries, waste for lead — with non-waste scrap excluded.
• Unit: per model, per plant, per year for batteries; per type and format, averaged per plant and year for packaging. A group-wide average answers neither regime.
• Chain: where the waste was collected and where it was recycled are part of the claim, including third-country equivalence under the PPWR.

What companies should do now

• Map regime to product: which rule hits which product, in which unit of calculation, from which date.
• Contract for evidence: supplier data per plant and model — material, waste origin, recycler — not a generic “recycled” assurance.
• Build the calculation early: a data model per plant and year that can adopt the Commission methodologies when they land in 2026.
• Put the percentage in the file: technical documentation and, where a passport applies, the passport record — so the claim presented later is the claim calculated then.

How Ledger Consortium helps

Ledger Consortium aggregates your and your suppliers’ product data, anchors each record on a governed blockchain — timestamped and tamper-evident — and keeps it updated as rules evolve. Anchoring proves a record existed and has not been altered; it does not certify that the data a client supplied was true — accuracy remains the responsibility of the operator placing the product on the market. Predictable costs, no token or crypto exposure, GDPR- and eIDAS-aligned. In Italy, the Ledger DPP is distributed by Il Sole 24 Ore (Valore24), whose channel onboards dozens of companies per month. See a working passport in our live demo, read the packaging regime in PPWR: Packaging Gets Its Own Rulebook and the repair-data companion in Repairability Scores and the Right to Repair, and browse News.