Thirty percent is a cliff, not a slope

The Plastic Packaging Tax applies to plastic packaging with less than 30% recycled content. At 30% it does not apply. There is no gradient: the whole liability appears or disappears at a single point.

Technically, 29% and 30% recycled content are the same material. Commercially they are not remotely the same, and that gap drives behaviour worth understanding before you specify anything.

What the cliff encourages

It encourages hitting exactly 30% and stopping. There is no financial reason to reach 45%, so almost nobody does. If your sustainability reporting assumes suppliers push past the threshold voluntarily, it is assuming something the policy actively discourages.

It also encourages optimistic measurement right at the boundary, which is a polite way of saying that a supplier reporting 30.0% across every batch for a year is reporting an outcome, not a measurement.

What we ask for

Batch certificates and a distribution, not a mean. A supplier genuinely running at 32% will show scatter between about 28% and 36%. A supplier reporting exactly 30% every time is rounding toward the threshold, and the risk of that sits with you rather than with them.

The awkward part

Sometimes the right answer is to accept the tax. A pack that needs virgin polymer for a food-contact or barrier reason, and that is genuinely lighter or longer-lived than the alternative, can be the better pack and the taxed one. We have recommended that twice. Both clients found it a difficult conversation internally, and both were right to have it.