Getting packaging data out of your suppliers
The reason first EPR submissions take one to six months is not the law. It is waiting on people who do not work for you. Here is how to shorten it.
Every state EPR programme asks the same underlying question: how many pounds of each packaging material did you place on our market last year. Answering it requires, for every SKU, a list of every component — bottle, closure, liner, label, case, divider, shipper, void fill, tape — each identified by material and weighed in grams.
Almost no brand between $10M and $250M has that table. The specifications live with a co-packer, a label printer and two or three film converters, none of whom have any obligation to answer quickly. That is why producers routinely report spending one to six months on a first submission, and almost all of that time is waiting.
The single change that halves the timeline
Ask for material and weight in the same message. The most common failure is a first round that asks “what is this made of”, gets an answer, and then a second round six weeks later that asks “and how much does it weigh”. Two round trips with a supplier who replies in ten working days is a month gone for information that could have arrived in one email.
The request table that works
Send this, filled in as far as you can, with the components you already know listed by row. Suppliers respond better to a table with their name on three rows than to a general request for “packaging specifications”.
| Your SKU | Component | Material (resin grade or fibre type) | Unit weight (g) | % PCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EXAMPLE-01 | Bottle, 32 oz | |||
| EXAMPLE-01 | Closure, 38 mm | |||
| EXAMPLE-01 | Front label |
Two lines to include with it, because they change the quality of what comes back:
- Unit weight must be the component weight, not the case or pallet weight. This single sentence prevents the most common unusable answer.
- “Plastic” is charged at an unclassified penalty rate; “PET”, “HDPE” or “PE/PET laminate” is charged at the correct, usually much lower, rate. Suppliers give vague answers when they do not know why the detail matters. Tell them it costs you money and the specificity improves immediately.
What to do while you wait
Do not leave rows blank. Populate every unknown with a reference weight, mark it as an estimate with its tolerance, and carry on. This does three useful things: it gives you a complete first-pass picture immediately, it shows you which gaps are material enough to chase hard, and it means a supplier who never replies does not block the submission — it just leaves one line at lower confidence, which you can disclose.
Our packaging weight reference publishes typical weights for 35 common formats, free, for exactly this purpose. A 12 oz aluminium can is about 14 g. A 10×13″ poly mailer is about 12 g. A medium corrugated shipper is about 230 g.
Weighing it yourself, when that is faster
For anything under a kilogram a 0.1 g kitchen scale is sufficient. Weigh ten empty units and divide by ten — that removes the scale’s error and the unit-to-unit variation in one step. For a brand with fewer than about forty SKUs, weighing your own packaging over an afternoon is genuinely faster than a supplier email chain, and the resulting number is a measurement rather than an estimate.
Record where every number came from
One extra column: supplier specification, weighed in-house, or estimated. When a regulator or an auditor asks how you arrived at a figure, that column is the answer. It costs nothing to fill in as you go and it is expensive to reconstruct afterwards.