In July 2026, Pro Food, Unionplast, and their member companies signed up to and are backing the "Stop the Clock" campaign, an appeal to Brussels calling for the general application date of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) – currently set for 12 August 2026 – to be postponed by at least 24 months.
With just a few days in hand to reach the RRWR regulation deadline, companies across the region are still lacking the implementing decrees, technical criteria, harmonised methodologies, and operational guidance as per the upcoming rules. Under such conditions, businesses are being asked to take on new obligations, prepare compliance documentation, and also plan investments without complete knowledge of the rules they’ll have to encounter in the foreseeable period. The issue arises due to the take effect within weeks and the delay in adopting the technical tools needed to demonstrate it. Hence, it creates a risky situation for regulatory and operational uncertainty for businesses.
STOP THE CLOCK movement is not a movement against environmental regulations or goals, as stated by Pro Food. The company shares the need to promote recycling, increase the use of secondary raw material, and reduce the impact across the packaging life cycle. It is also paid attention to the fact that postponement is sought precisely to prevent a set of rules whose underlying principles are widely supported from being generated once and put into practice immediately.
Among all such issues that are still to be resolved are the criteria for assessing packaging recyclability and how responsibilities will be divided among various supply chain operators. Hence, businesses are being asked to certify the compliance of their products while significant parts of the implementing framework will only be defined through subsequent delegated acts, technical standards, and interpretative clarifications.
"Businesses are not asking for the transition to be halted, but to be able to carry it out based on complete, verifiable rules," says Mauro Salini, President of Pro Food. "It is not reasonable to ask companies to declare conformity, change their processes, and plan investments while essential elements of the implementing framework have yet to be defined. Stop the Clock is a call for responsibility and legal certainty, not a step back on sustainability.”
For Pro Food, the postponement is also needed to give closer consideration to the effects of the restrictions set out in Article 25 and Annex V of the PPWR, which from 1 January 2030 will affect, among other things, single-use plastic packaging for fresh, unprocessed fruit and vegetables pre-packed in quantities below 1.5 kilograms, along with certain formats used in the HORECA sector.
Such restrictions were specifically not preceded by a comparative impact assessment capable of weighing the performance of alternatives across their full life cycle. According to the brand, swapping one material for another won’t aid in sustainability easily. Recyclability, recycled content, transport, product protection, shelf life, and food waste prevention all need to be taken into account, too, as per the company.
The approach has a major importance for the fresh produce sector, where packaging plays a vital role during post-harvest handling, transport, distribution, and storage. The ongoing formats that are in use may also be banned as per the new regulations of PPWR that already contain percentages of post-consumer recycled material that exceed the targets the PPWR sets for 2040. A complete ban on such materials, therefore, risks penalizing solutions that are already aligned with the circular economy principles, without demonstrating that alternatives perform better.
The need to assess the effects of restrictions in advance is also apparent from the experience with the EU's Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Directive, which, since 2019, has banned the use of certain categories of single-use plastic products such as plates, cutlery, and straws. The value of EU imports from China, Turkey, and India of substitute products – including paper or cellulose-pulp cups and plates and wooden cutlery – rose from approximately €290 million in 2018 to around €730 million in 2025, reaching a combined total of almost €5 billion over the period.
The data specifically does not point to a concrete risk. Replacing single-use products made in Europe with others imported from third countries, manufactured using alternative materials and under economic conditions unattainable in Europe, does not deliver a genuine reduction in consumption or a proven environmental benefit.
"Before banning a solution, careful consideration needs to be given to what will replace it and under what conditions," Salini continues. "Otherwise, we risk shifting production, jobs, and a good part of the environmental impact outside the European Union, without achieving the stated objectives."
Hence, Pro Food is calling for the postponement to be used to complete the delegated acts, testing methodologies, and technical standards that are still missing to clarify the obligations of the various operators, along with ensuring uniform application and enforcement across all Member States.
31 July 2026
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