UK data.gov.uk Packaging Datasets (Environment Agency, Defra)

Datadory ships the UK data.gov.uk Packaging Datasets (Environment Agency, Defra) collection as one maintained package for Metal, Glass & Plastic Containers work. It is the UK government's packaging-data estate in one place: 415 directory entries returned against 'packaging' as of August 2026, with the highest-relevance hits resolving to the Environment Agency's National Packaging Waste Database family and Defra's legacy time series.

The National Packaging Waste Database side is the regulatory spine of UK packaging. Seven recurring series cover the whole compliance chain: Packaging Flow Summary (material moving through the system), Packaging Regulations Approved Schemes (the compliance schemes obligated companies join), Packaging Revenue Report (what the system collects), Packaging Regulations - Producers (registered obligated entities), Approved Reprocessors and Exporters (accredited recyclers), Recovery and Recycling Packaging Summary, and the Packaging Producer Public Register. Alongside them sits Defra's Recycling and Recovery from Packaging 1999-2008 series - the pre-database historical baseline.

Get a sample of this dataset - tell us which series, materials or years matter and we cut real rows from the registers and summaries rather than screenshots.

Directory rows for five of the highest-relevance entries, flat exactly as they arrive:

# Directory row -- headline material-flow statistics
title           Packaging Flow Summary
publisher       Environment Agency
record_revised  2020-01-22

# Directory row -- compliance-scheme register
title           Packaging Regulations Approved Schemes
publisher       Environment Agency
record_revised  2026-07-06

# Directory row -- fee and revenue accounting
title           Packaging Revenue Report
publisher       Environment Agency
record_revised  2026-07-06

# Directory row -- recovery and recycling totals
title           Recovery and Recycling Packaging Summary
publisher       Environment Agency
record_revised  2026-07-06

# Directory row -- legacy national time series
title           Recycling and Recovery from Packaging 1999 to 2008
publisher       Defra
record_revised  2014-03-01

Read the five rows together and the shape of UK packaging regulation falls out. One entry quantifies the material; three administer the obligation - who joined a scheme, who paid, who recovered and exported; one preserves the pre-2008 history the modern series replaced. Each row keys to a full record carrying its publishing body, revision date and reporting span, so a screen of the directory becomes a queryable map of who is obligated in UK packaging and what happens to the material afterwards.

Five core fields recur across every directory row, each verified against the published records. title and publisher identify the entry and the body behind it - the Environment Agency for the National Packaging Waste Database family, Defra for the legacy series. record_revised stamps when the entry's descriptive record was last touched, which separates actively maintained registers from dormant ones at a glance. temporal_coverage_from and _to bound the reporting period the entry's figures cover, and format_label tags the file form the underlying material takes - Excel workbooks dominate the statistical summaries, with PDF and HTML appearing on narrative and register records.

The complete dictionary follows; record-specific columns - register entity lists, scheme memberships, accreditation and tonnage lines - fold into the request step rather than cluttering every pull.

Three chips summarize the footprint:

• Geography: United Kingdom. Environment Agency records cover England, and several series amalgamate figures from all four UK environment agencies into a national picture, while the Defra legacy series is UK-level throughout.
• Temporal: roughly 1999-2026 depending on the record. The Defra series opens in 1999; National Packaging Waste Database summaries span approximately 2006-2025, with pEPR-era workbooks covering 2023-2025. Directory records themselves carry revision dates into 2026.
• Granularity: per-record, and deliberately mixed - the statistical summaries report quarterly, monthly-cumulative, half-yearly (H1/H2) and annual periods; the registers hold one row per registered company, scheme or accredited reprocessor.

Set against the wider Datadory catalog - where the average quality score across all datasets sits at 7.81 - this collection scores 7/10: official statistics with verified field definitions, bounded only by the reporting intervals the regulators themselves publish at.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You choose the channel and the cadence; the field dictionary above travels unchanged across all three. Bulk files suit overnight loads into BI tools and data lakes, structured API responses suit dashboards that refresh themselves, and warehouse delivery puts register rows one join away from your customer, supplier or portfolio tables. When a new reporting period lands in a summary, it arrives through the same channel as everything else - changing cadence is a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

• Producer obligation mapping. The registered-entity and approved-scheme records identify who carries UK packaging obligations and which compliance schemes serve them - the starting grid for anyone selling compliance, auditing or recycling services into that population.
• Recovery-market sizing. Flow, recovery and recycling summaries quantify tonnage through the UK system, giving reprocessors, investors and equipment vendors a defensible denominator for share-of-market and capacity arguments.
• ESG and recycled-content claims. Two decades of recovery and recycling series give brand owners citable baselines for packaging-recovery commitments, with the pEPR years extending the record through the reform transition.
• Competitive intelligence for waste-sector operators. Approved reprocessors and exporters records map the accredited side of the industry - who recovers what, and where the consolidation opportunities sit.
• Policy and regulatory analysis. The 1999-2026 arc captures every regime change in UK packaging policy in comparable tabular form, which is exactly the series impact assessments and consultation responses need.
• Accountability journalism. Revenue reports next to recovery volumes put numbers on both sides of the producer-responsibility ledger, delivered on a cadence that keeps investigations current.

Market researchers get official tonnage and obligation counts for UK packaging market sizing without hand-stitching spreadsheets from four government bodies. Journalists and academics get the full 1999-2026 recovery record behind packaging-waste accountability reporting. Investors and quants get register-derived populations of obligated producers and accredited reprocessors to overlay against revenue estimates and deal flow. Data scientists get typed, documented tables ready to join onto trade, emissions or company data without building a government-site pipeline of their own.

Three things worth knowing upfront. First, this is a directory of related records, not one wide file - the registers, schemes, revenue and flow summaries share no common key, so samples arrive cut per series rather than merged. Second, coverage is mixed geography by design: England-only on the agency records, four-nation amalgamations on others - tell us your market definition and the sample will label each series accordingly. Third, the statistical summaries publish at their regulators' own reporting intervals - quarterly, monthly-cumulative, half-yearly or annual depending on the series - so sub-interval estimates need modeling, not extraction.

Notes that pair well with this page:

• The metal, glass and plastic containers data hub collects every dataset in the industry, this one included.
• Best-of ranking: metal, glass and plastic containers datasets puts this collection in context against the alternatives.
• European counterpart: Eurostat packaging waste statistics - the pan-EU recycling series to set against this UK record.
• US counterpart: Container Recycling Institute beverage container data archive - the American container-recovery angle.
• Industry guide: metal, glass and plastic containers data guide walks the full industry dataset stack.