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QR codes and the law: can required information live behind a scan?
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Introduction
As information moves to a digital layer, the legal question is when information that law requires, or that fairness demands, may sit behind a code rather than on the pack. A claim that circulates in packaging commentary — and appeared in earlier notes for this library — is that UK rules already allow a QR code to replace printed environmental information. The located instruments do not say that.
The UK guidance
The CMA's operative guidance on environmental claims — the 2021 Green Claims Code and its underlying guidance on environmental claims for goods and services — addresses omission rather than medium. Its principle that claims "must not omit or hide important information" is elaborated by a gloss permissive as to channel: in an online claim, required information "should be made available by a single click through link (and nothing provided via that link should contradict the main claim)" (CMA, 2021). The Code's checklist treats the QR code as an approved overflow channel in terms: "Information that really can't fit into the claim can be easily accessed by customers in another way (QR code, website, etc.)". Its case-study material features a takeaway container using an on-pack QR code for detailed sourcing information, an example in which the CMA finds the headline claims misleading notwithstanding the QR-carried detail, from which it follows that the linked layer may supplement a surface claim but does not cure a misleading one (CMA, 2021).
The Authority's January 2026 addition to its guidance suite, Making green claims: getting it right, across the supply chain, extends the framework to business-to-business and supply-chain claims. Verification of that document and its coverage found no QR-code prohibition, and no CMA statement to the effect circulated in commentary could be located (CMA, 2026; see the note on sources and verification below). UK doctrine, so far as the instruments establish it, is accordingly that the claim on the pack must be complete enough not to mislead when read alone; that genuinely material qualifications may not be buried; and that supporting detail, substantiation and extended information may be placed in the linked layer. That position is not a prohibition on digital carriage but a specification of the boundary between surface and depth, and it corresponds closely to the position emerging in EU law.
The EU regime
The EU's packaging regulation legislates digital carriage across the instruments examined elsewhere in this group. It provides for the reuse label paired with a mandatory QR or equivalent carrier for system information and rotation tracking; for EPR-scheme identification achievable only through "a QR code or other standardised, open, digital-marking technology" from February 2027, in the recital's words, which retires the printed Green Dot; and for voluntary QR supplementation of the harmonised sorting pictograms in respect of component-level disposal detail (Regulation (EU) 2025/40, recital 71; Complydex, n.d.).
The mandate structure has a shape that summary treatments tend to flatten. What the EU directs into the digital layer is system information, comprising financing identification, loop logistics and granular component data, whereas the consumer-operative instruction remains printed: the harmonised material-composition pictograms, the mandated compostability statements and the deposit marks. The regulation's implicit allocation is therefore by audience, with surfaces carrying the disposal decision made at the bin in seconds and carriers holding information consulted deliberately or read by machines. The claims-law side of EU law polices the same boundary from the opposite direction: the unfair-practices framework, as amended by the Empowering Consumers Directive, requires that material information reach the consumer before the transactional decision, which a scan-gated disclosure does not reliably achieve (Directive (EU) 2024/825). An environmental claim whose essential qualification is placed behind a QR code accordingly fails EU doctrine for the same reason it fails the CMA's, namely not because the channel is digital but because the qualification was material to a decision taken at the shelf.
The two-layer allocation
Set side by side, the regimes converge on a two-layer allocation, which is stated here explicitly because no instrument states it in those terms.
Layer one: the surface. Whatever the reader requires for the decision the package occasions, whether of purchase or of disposal, must appear on the pack: the claim's substance and its materially qualifying limits, under both regimes' claims law; the sorting instruction, under the EU's mandated labels; the deposit fact, under deposit-system law; and warnings, in the form of compostability statements. The surface must be sufficient standing alone, on the shared assumption — supported by the behavioural evidence reviewed in this collection's fifth theme — that scanning is a minority behaviour which cannot be presumed at decision speed.
Layer two: the depth. Substantiation, system detail, component granularity, market-specific variation and machine-facing identity, being information whose reader is deliberate, professional or mechanical, belong in the carrier layer, to which both regimes now actively direct it, the CMA by endorsing the single click and the EU by mandating the code.
The boundary's contested zone is thereby also identified, namely information that is material but voluminous: the multi-market recyclability position that a printed symbol cannot compress without inaccuracy, and the qualification for which no label affords space. The French dematerialisation precedent for small formats, the EU's component-level QR option and the CMA's "really can't fit" formulation each address that zone, and the line the guidance sketches will be drawn more precisely through litigated cases.
The behavioural premise
The two-layer allocation rests on an empirical premise that neither regime states, namely that the surface serves the many and the scan serves the few. The evidence bearing on that premise, and the gaps in it, therefore belong to the doctrine's account, since the boundary's future location depends on them.
What is documented is stated willingness. Survey research in the sector reports large majorities of consumers professing readiness to scan on-pack codes for recycling information, with figures above seventy per cent reported from a United States labeling research programme, and that willingness constitutes the industry case for digital migration. What does not exist, as this collection's evidence theme sets out in detail, is credible, independently audited behavioural scan data for sustainability codes at retail or at the bin. The published figures on actual scanning derive predominantly from vendors of code platforms, and no regime's rule-making record contains real-world scan-rate evidence from which the consumer-information consequences of a channel shift could be computed. The conservatism of the doctrine with respect to the surface — the CMA's insistence that the claim not mislead when read alone, and the EU's retention of the printed sorting instruction — operates in effect as the regulators' response to that evidentiary gap, the digital layer being treated as supplementary precisely because it has not been demonstrated to be reached.
The premise also has a distributional dimension. Scan-gated information presupposes a device, connectivity and the literacy required to navigate what resolves, and those presuppositions fail differentially across age, income and disability, an exclusion gradient identified in this collection's evidence agenda as under-researched. France's dematerialisation practice, which permits digital delivery of sorting information for the smallest formats where print is physically impossible, addresses cases in which the surface is unavailable; a regime that migrated decision-material information for standard formats would extend the arrangement to populations least equipped to respond to it. The stability of the two-layer allocation therefore rests not on legal caution alone: until the scanning premise is evidenced, the printed surface is the only channel whose reach is established.
Limits of the assertion
The propositions that a code on a pack does and does not establish may be stated in the form used throughout this theme.
A QR code's presence establishes carriage capacity and nothing further: compliance with a carrier mandate where one applies, and an offer of depth otherwise. It does not establish that the linked content satisfies any disclosure duty, that question being determined by doctrine on location, timing and materiality. It does not establish that the content is true, claims law following the claim into the resolved layer undiminished. It does not establish that consumers received anything: the stated-intent evidence on scanning, and the absence of audited real-world scan-rate data, are treated in this collection's evidence theme, and no regime currently conditions validity on demonstrated scan behaviour. Conversely, the absence of printed detail behind a lawful carrier arrangement establishes no concealment, since the two-layer allocation renders some depth legitimate and the enforcement question is in every case whether the surface sufficed for the decision it occasioned.
Transmission of the circulating claim
The circulating claim's transmission may be described by reference to three of its features, each of which recurs in comparable claims about this subject matter.
The first is narrative form. A contradiction in which the United Kingdom forbids what the European Union mandates presents regulatory divergence as a dilemma for multi-market practitioners, which lends the claim a structure that summary treatments reproduce readily.
The second is proximity to an accurate proposition. The CMA does police hidden information, and the step from "must not hide material information" to "must not put information behind codes" requires only that the guidance's channel-permissive clauses be omitted.
The third is the cost of verification. Checking the claim requires reading the full text of the 2021 guidance together with the 2026 supplement, and the circulating claim cites, where it cites at all, other commentary rather than any CMA document. The claim appears in professional as well as consumer discourse.
The same combination — a dramatised proposition, a root in an actual doctrine, and citation chains that do not reach the primary source — is recorded in this collection in respect of the Green Dot's supposed recyclability meaning, the resin code's gradation myth, and the "packaging DPP". The corrective procedure applied in each case consists in stating the circulating claim exactly, retrieving the primary instruments, quoting their operative language, and then setting out what those instruments do establish. In the present case what they establish is the two-layer allocation described above, a cross-jurisdictional convergence that the asserted contradiction obscured.
Summary
The corrected position indicates that the digital turn is not deregulating the package's surface but re-pricing it. As carriers absorb the system-facing and the voluminous, what remains printed is increasingly what law and cognition jointly require to be immediately available, with the consequence that each remaining square centimetre of surface claim carries more regulatory weight rather than less. The claim this article corrects presented the regimes as in conflict over the channel; the instruments instead disclose a common allocation for the two-layer package, in which the scan extends the label without discharging it. Under both regimes the surface must be sufficient standing alone, the doctrinal assumption being that no scan will occur.
That assumption is not a position on the technology. It concerns the inference from availability to receipt, that is, the proposition that information a consumer could retrieve functions as information the consumer has. Each discipline the allocation imposes — material claims on the surface, qualifications adjacent to the claims they qualify, and no burying of unfavourable information — declines to allow the possibility of a scan to discharge the label's duty. Should scanning behaviour change at population scale, the allocation's factual premise would erode and its rules would be expected to follow, a contingency that both regimes' guidance implicitly reserves. Until then, the two-layer package represents an allocation by audience rather than a compromise between print and digital carriage: material for the decision on the surface, documentation in the layer to which deliberate enquiry proceeds.
References
CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) (2021) Green claims code: making environmental claims (including Making environmental claims on goods and services). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) (2026) Making green claims: getting it right, across the supply chain, 22 January. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Complydex (n.d.) PPWR labelling requirements: Article 12. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Directive (EU) 2024/825 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 February 2024, OJ L, 2024/825, 6.3.2024. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 December 2024 on packaging and packaging waste, OJ L, 2025/40, 22.1.2025. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Note on sources and verification
The CMA quotations — the omission principle, the single-click formulation, and the checklist's QR-permissive language — are from the 2021 guidance as published on gov.uk. The January 2026 supply-chain guidance was verified as to existence, title and date; neither its gov.uk publication nor the professional summaries consulted contained any QR-code prohibition, and the contrary claim circulating in commentary, including earlier planning notes prepared for this collection, could not be sourced to any CMA document — it is treated here as unsupported, and the correction is the article's premise. The EU carriage provisions rest on the Regulation's recital 71 as retrieved verbatim, with article-level detail from the compliance analysis cited, which reflects the recurring verbatim-text limitation. The characterisation of pre-transactional materiality doctrine under the amended unfair-practices framework is legal analysis of the directive's structure rather than quotation. The "two-layer doctrine" is a synthesis advanced in this article, offered as interpretation and not as any regulator's stated position. The stated-willingness figures for scanning (above seventy per cent) are as reported in sector research from The Recycling Partnership's labeling programme and are cited at that level of generality; the absence of independently audited behavioural scan data is an absence claim arising from this collection's evidence research. France's small-format dematerialisation practice is drawn from market research conducted for this collection on the Triman regime.
Last verified: 18 August 2026.