pEPR Packaging Data: What Producers Must Report and Where It Lands

Packaged-goods producers in the United Kingdom report what they place on the market by material, by household versus non-household use and, since 2025, by how recyclable that packaging is. The published evidence of those returns sits in one file: 'pEPR 2023, 2024 and 2025 Reported Packaging Data', released on 31 July 2026 inside the Environment Agency's National Packaging Waste Database. The workbook runs eleven sheets splitting large-producer (LP) and small-producer (SP) reporting into weight summaries, drinks summaries and a single 2025-only Recyclability Assessment Methodology (RAM) tab.

The structure tells you what the regulator asks for. Seven material columns run through every weight tab - Aluminium, Fibre Composite, Glass, Other, Paper/Card, Plastic and Steel - while row categories separate household, non-household, binned and Total Supplied. In the LP_2023_weight_summary tab, the Total Supplied row carries 1,144,035.744 tonnes of glass, 1,314,674.342 tonnes of plastic, 227,718.468 tonnes of steel and 117,141.408 tonnes of aluminium. Those four numbers alone show why container makers track this file: they are the regulated mirror image of the shipment series trade bodies publish.

The LP and SP sheet families answer this without any policy reading. Large producers file weight summaries and drinks summaries per year (LP_2023/2024/2025), while small producers appear only for 2024 and 2025 (SP_2024/2025). The scale gap is visible in the cells: SP_2025_weight_summary records 474.754 tonnes of aluminium, 1,494.406 tonnes of glass and 41,308.9 tonnes of paper/card, next to the million-tonne-plus glass and plastic figures large producers reported for 2023.

Drinks tabs switch units from tonnes to container counts, which is where container-level demand reads come from. The LP_2025_drinks_summary tab records 6,983,218,602 aluminium, 6,269,327,894 plastic and 2,347,926,588 glass household drink containers for 2025_H1 - roughly three times as many aluminium cans as glass bottles in the household drinks stream. The 2025-only RAM tab adds the recyclability dimension, rating materials Green, Amber or Red and subdividing plastic into Rigid and further categories; its Green rows carry 10,066.583 tonnes of aluminium, 608,447.912 tonnes of glass and 361,202.306 tonnes of paper/card for 2025_H1_RAM.

Reporting tonnage is only half of producer responsibility; paying into the recovery market is the other half, and NPWD publishes both sides. Alongside the pEPR workbook sit UK producer obligation tables split by agency - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each get their own cut - plus annual PRN/PERN revenue reports by activity reaching back to 2006. Glass remelt versus non-remelt figures cover 2010-2012, and carry-forward tonnage files span 2006-2007, so the pre-pEPR regime is documented on the same page as the current one.

Discovery is the second half of the workflow, because NPWD publishes files but does not advertise what else exists. The directory layer is UK data.gov.uk - Packaging datasets (Environment Agency, Defra): 415 results across 21 pages for the keyword 'packaging' when Datadory researched it on 21 August 2026, dominated by Environment Agency records harvested from NPWD - Packaging Flow Summary, Packaging Regulations Approved Schemes, Packaging Revenue Report, Packaging Regulations - Producers (Registered Entities only), Packaging Regulations - Approved Reprocessors and Exporters, Recovery and Recycling Packaging Summary and the Packaging Producer Public Register - plus Defra's Recycling and Recovery from Packaging 1999-2008 series.

Three access routes exist and two skip the browser entirely: query directly, call the CKAN API at data.gov.uk/api/3/action/package_search?q=packaging&rows=N (Datadory measured 2,348 results there against 415 in the UI, because the UI applies undocumented relevance filtering), or go straight to the NPWD PublicSummaryData page and its 133 FileDownload links. Each CKAN record exposes seven metadata fields including metadata_modified - the Packaging Revenue Report and Recovery and Recycling Packaging Summary both show 6 July 2026 - so you can check freshness per record before citing it. Note the two-hop reality: resource URLs point at the NPWD domain, so bulk harvesting always means one request to data.gov.uk for discovery and another to the Environment Agency for the file.

Automation has three honest limits, all logged in Datadory's research notes: FileId values are opaque UUIDs with no listing API, so new releases must be found by re-parsing the HTML page; revisions occur silently under the site's own caveat; and whether pEPR reporting moves to a different publication platform after full scheme rollout is unconfirmed. Snapshot early, date everything, and treat the 31 July 2026 release as a moving baseline rather than a final account of 2023-2025.