Packaging EPR in the Netherlands — Afvalfonds Verpakkingen

The Dutch scheme is administered by Afvalfonds Verpakkingen, and it is structurally simpler than the German one: one organisation, one contribution, one annual return. The complication is elsewhere — in the weight threshold that decides whether you pay anything at all.

The threshold

The waste management contribution — the afvalbeheersbijdrage — is charged to companies that place more than a set annual tonnage of packaging on the Dutch market. The long-standing figure is 50,000 kg a year, across all materials combined.

Below it you are still a producer in the legal sense, and you may still have to declare, but no contribution is due.

Two things about that threshold catch people out:

• It is all packaging combined, not per material. A company at 30 tonnes of board and 25 tonnes of film is over it.
• It counts packaging you place on the market, which includes packaging around goods you import for your own use as well as packaging you sell.

If you are anywhere near 50 tonnes, do the arithmetic properly before assuming you are under. The material-and-weight breakdown on our delivery documentation exists for exactly this.

What is charged

The contribution is per kilogram, by material, and the rates are published annually. The ordering is stable even when the numbers move: plastics cost the most per kilo, paper and board considerably less, wood least of all.

The Netherlands also applies modulated fees — a lower rate for packaging that is easier to recycle, a higher one for packaging that is not. This is the part worth acting on, because it turns a recyclability decision into a line on an invoice rather than a statement of intent.

The annual return

One declaration a year, covering the previous calendar year, stating the weight of packaging placed on the Dutch market by material category.

What it asks for is straightforward and what makes it painful is the record keeping: weights, by material, for a whole year, reconstructed in the spring. A company that has kept the figures monthly does it in an afternoon. A company that has to work them back from invoices does not.

Single-use plastics are separate

The SUP obligations — for single-use plastic items covered by the Single-Use Plastics Directive — sit alongside the packaging contribution and are reported separately. For the product categories on this site the overlap is small, but if you also place food-service items on the Dutch market they are a distinct return with distinct deadlines.

Our side of it

We are registered for the transport packaging we place on the Dutch market — pallets and stretch film securing our own shipments — and we report it.

For the packaging we sell you, we provide the figure your return needs: kilograms by material, per delivery or per quarter. Polyethylene, paper and board, and wood, separately.

That breakdown is the single most useful thing a packaging supplier can give a Dutch customer, and it costs us nothing because we already know the weights — they are on the specification.

Germany and the Netherlands together

If you sell into both, note the difference in shape rather than the difference in detail:

	Germany	Netherlands
Register	LUCID, mandatory for all packaging	Afvalfonds, with a weight threshold
Pay	Only for consumer sales packaging, via a dual system	Above the threshold, all packaging
Return	To register and to the dual system, reconciled	One annual declaration
Biggest trap	Registering late — it is a sales ban	Assuming you are under the threshold

Both want the same underlying data: weight, by material, by year. Keep it once and both returns become straightforward.