Market requirements lookup

What the lookup does

A global packaging specification faces several kinds of rule at once. One market may require a material code. Another may require a disposal route. A third may prohibit the same graphic unless an infrastructure threshold is met. Deposit marks, producer-responsibility symbols, compostability statements and general environmental claims may sit in separate instruments and be enforced by different institutions. A country-level statement that “labelling is mandatory” conceals more than it reveals.

The market is the entry point. The legal unit of analysis stays the instrument. Each row leads to an article that identifies the instrument, its legal status, what must or may appear on the pack, who is bound, the dates, and the enforcing body. Where the regime is divided between federal and subnational law, as in the United States and Canada, the index follows that division rather than inventing a single national answer.

How legal status is coded

In force means that an instrument has legal effect and the relevant duty or prohibition presently applies. Adopted but not yet applied means the text is final but the operative date has not arrived, or a later implementing measure must first start the clock. Proposed describes a measure that has not completed the legislative or regulatory process. Stalled is reserved for an initiative whose formal record remains open but whose procedure has ceased to advance. Abandoned means the relevant proposal has been withdrawn, rejected or superseded. Voluntary describes a scheme or mark that is not required by the cited public law, although contractual, retailer or scheme rules may still make participation commercially consequential.

Two qualifications matter. First, an enacted statute may remain in force while enforcement is restrained by an injunction. That is the position recorded for California SB 343: the statute and its manufacture-date trigger remain in the code, while the Attorney General is preliminarily enjoined from enforcing it pending further order. Second, a scheme can be voluntary in law but tightly governed in use. How2Recycle, OPRL and certification seals are examples: no general statute requires every package to carry them, but a participant must comply with the scheme licence and classification rules.

Who is bound

The obligated party is not inferred from the brand on the front of the pack. Depending on the instrument, responsibility may attach to the manufacturer defined by product law, the importer placing packaging on the market, a producer defined by EPR legislation, the retailer supplying an own-brand product, a distributor, an online marketplace or a scheme operator. The same group can occupy different statutory roles for different flows of packaging. Theme 2 names the obligated party for each rule, and records where the role depends on facts a general reference page cannot resolve.

Lookup by region

The table below is generated from the published Theme 2 navigation and the status statement at the head of each linked article. Its purpose is triage: it identifies the page that answers the relevant question and presents the article's status statement in condensed form. The complete rule, exceptions and verification record remain on the linked page.

What the table does not establish

The presence of a page does not mean that a country has a comprehensive sustainable-packaging label. Several pages exist precisely to correct an overstatement: Germany's recyclability assessment framework does not itself prescribe consumer-facing artwork; Australia's national scheme is voluntary; Mexico's resin-code standard is not a general recyclability claim; and the EU harmonised label has been legislated in outline while its operative format and application date depend on implementing acts.

Nor does absence from the index establish absence of law. The lookup is bounded by the thirty-four questions selected for Theme 2 and by the sources located at the verification date. General consumer-protection law, product-specific labeling, hazardous-substance communication, food-contact requirements and transport marks may apply outside the Atlas's packaging-sustainability scope. A market should be recorded as “not assessed” rather than “no requirement” unless a systematic search has been completed.

Research use

The lookup supports comparative research because it keeps three variables separate: the status of the instrument, the content of the label and the identity of the obligated party. A comparison may then ask, for example, which jurisdictions mandate a disposal-route instruction, which regulate the chasing-arrows symbol as an environmental representation, or which place the duty on an importer rather than a producer-responsibility organisation. Combining those questions into a single yes-or-no field would create a simpler dataset and a materially less accurate one.

Primary sources

The primary sources are those listed on each linked Theme 2 article. The principal cross-market anchors are Regulation (EU) 2025/40 on packaging and packaging waste, available at Open source; California Public Resources Code §§ 42355–42355.51 and CalRecycle's Accurate Recycling Labels materials, available at Open source; and the United Kingdom's EPR guidance collection, available at Open source.

Note on sources and verification

The table reproduces the scope and status language of the existing Theme 2 pages; it does not independently re-adjudicate every proposition in those pages. The PPWR text, CalRecycle's SB 343 implementation page and the UK EPR collection were rechecked on 20 August 2026 because they anchor multiple rows. Where a linked article records a limitation, unresolved point or source that could not be retrieved, that qualification controls over the condensed wording in this lookup.

Last verified: 20 August 2026.