A leg travelling on a pallet, wrapped and strapped, is four rows: the pallet, the film, the corners, the strap. That is how the sheet is filled in by hand, and that is how Tarafex writes it. The recipe says which packaging goes with the product; the catalogue says what that packaging is.
Typical columns a buyer already asks for — Tarafex holds them once, next to the item, not in the email:
Without a recipe, a catalogue is a list of things you buy. With a recipe — “60 legs: one pallet, 40 m of film, eight corners” — the sheet can be written. Sending 90 scales the recipe; whole things round up, metres do not. The sheet always shows the batch it was written for.
Half of what a buyer asks is not knowable from your side of the fence. What a foam is made of, whether it carries a restricted substance, where it was made: your supplier knows. A supplier link is how that lands in the catalogue under their name and date, instead of being retyped from a PDF.
A weight is taken only when it is unambiguous per unit. A document total across several lines is never split. A figure is never derived from area, price or material. If the sheet would have to guess, the cell is empty. Empty is information: it tells you what still has to be weighed or asked.
The same records write the declaration of conformity, so the two documents cannot disagree. Kilograms for EPR are a different cut of the same catalogue — shipments, not recipes — and reusable packaging never silently enters that total.
A customer sends a supplier questionnaire and asks for a recycled share. The strongest answer is a chain-of-custody certificate with its CoC number, then a mill declaration with EN 643 delivery notes, then a mill technical sheet stating the fibre percentage. A self-declaration alone is the weakest, and it is the one most often sent. Tarafex keeps the answer, the source and the date beside each other, so the sheet can say which of the four it is.
Two things are read as the same and are not. Pre-consumer and post-consumer are different claims, and a scheme may accept one and not the other. FSC Mix 70 % is not 70 % recycled — it is certified fibre, mostly virgin. And a claim about content says nothing about recyclability: carbon black defeats the infrared sorter, a laminate or a plastic window stops a carton being mono-material, and a disruptor of that kind can cost more at the scheme than the recycled share saves. Tarafex records each as its own field and never lets one stand in for another.
Buyers ask for schemes by name — GRS for recycled content, Blauer Engel as an ecolabel, a mass-balance claim for chemically recycled plastic. They are different things: mass balance allocates recycled input across a production run rather than to the piece in your hand, and an ecolabel is awarded to a product, not to a percentage. Tarafex stores each as what it is, with the certificate reference and the date, so the sheet can show which claim is behind which number.
Recyclability is measured, not declared. Germany's register authority maintains a minimum standard for measuring it, and what fails is usually a recycling-inhibiting component rather than the main material: a coating, a sleeve, a dark pigment, an inseparable window. The material code printed on the pack — PAP 20 for corrugated board, PET 01 for a bottle — says what it is, not how well it sorts. Tarafex keeps the component, the code and the disruptor as separate fields, because a fee schedule reads them separately too.
In German, Verpackungsdatenblatt reads first as a logistics specification — dimensions, layers per pallet, stacking — because there is a named standard behind it, VDA 9008 of the automotive industry. In French and Dutch the same word goes straight to composition, weight per component and recycled content. This page is the second one: the material and compliance side, not a loading plan.
The evidence route also has local names. In the Netherlands, KIDV sets out the ways a recycled share may be shown — a documentation audit through the whole chain, chain certification such as ISO 15343 or RecyClass, or mass balance with a certificate at each link — and the chain may not be broken. Since 2025 Dutch suppliers must also deliver packaging fields for new and changed GTINs through GS1 Data Source at least once a year, because their retailers need them for the Verpact declaration.
The material code on a pack is set by Commission Decision 97/129/EC, and paper has three of them, not one: PAP 20 corrugated board, PAP 21 non-corrugated board, PAP 22 paper. A buyer's form usually asks for the code, not the word. And since February 2025 there is an ISO standard for the sheet itself — ISO 59040, the product circularity data sheet, answered as true-or-false statements on a shared template so one supplier's answers can be compared with another's. No EU packaging law requires it; a customer's purchasing agreement might.
Board is also readable without a certificate. Testliner and Wellenstoff are made from recovered fibre; kraftliner is not. So a box with a kraft outer has virgin fibre in the layer a buyer sees, whatever the average for the sheet says. Ask which paper sits in which layer, and ask whether the supplier's percentage is of the board or of the finished box — glue, ink and a plastic window are not board.
Recycled content is how much of the material came from recycling. Recyclability is whether this pack can be recycled. And a recyclable material is not proof that anything was recycled. A laminated board can carry a great deal of recovered fibre and recycle badly. Buyers' forms mix all three, and an answer that mixes them is the one that gets challenged.
A certificate number alone proves nothing either. Check the number in the FSC or PEFC register, and check that the article code on your invoice is inside the certificate's scope — a mill-level certificate does not cover every product it makes. FSC Recycled is not automatically 100 % recycled; PEFC Recycled means at least 70 % from recycling; FSC Mix is certified fibre, mostly virgin. Where the calculation itself is questioned, EN 45557 covers recycled content at product level and ISO 14021 (in Italy cited as UNI EN ISO 14021:2021) governs what may be claimed publicly.
PCR is post-consumer recycled material — waste that reached a household or a business and came back. PIR is post-industrial, the offcuts and trim from production that never left the factory. Buyers almost always ask for PCR, and the two must be shown separately: presenting PIR as PCR is the single most common mistake on a packaging data sheet. Tarafex keeps them as two fields, not one.
By mass, never by volume, and component by component. Each part — body, closure, label, adhesive, outer box, film — carries its own material, its own weight and its own recycled share; the figure for the whole is the weighted sum of those parts. A single number for the whole packaging, worked out in the head, is what falls apart the first time a buyer asks which component it applies to.
No, and it is worth being blunt about it: recycled content cannot be measured in the finished item, it can only be documented along the supply chain. Until the supplier confirms it, the honest answer on the sheet is that the figure has been requested, not an estimate. Tarafex leaves the column empty and says so rather than filling a blank to look complete.
A written supplier declaration naming the share, and a certificate behind it where one exists — FSC Recycled or FSC Mix and PEFC for paper and board, and schemes such as EuCertPlast, RecyClass or ISCC for plastics. Standards like EN 15343 and ISO 14021 describe how the claim is traced and worded. Tarafex holds whichever the supplier gave, with the date it was given.
The weighted one. Corrugated board is an outer liner, a fluting and an inner liner, each with its own grammage and its own recycled share, so a single figure for the box is the sum of the layers by weight. Ask the supplier to break it down layer by layer rather than accepting one number for the box, and ask which basis the buyer means: the board alone, or the whole sales unit including tape, label and any window film.
By the number of pieces it carries. The sales packaging counts in full; the outer box is its empty weight divided by the pieces inside it; the transport layer is divided across everything on the pallet. Buyers usually want those levels shown separately rather than added into one figure, because the licensing and the recycled-content questions look at different levels.
Either your own weighing of the empty, dry item, or the supplier's specification — and it matters which, because an auditor will ask. Record the source alongside the number: own weighing or supplier data, with the date. What must never happen is a weight derived by subtracting the product from the filled item; the content and the moisture move, and the figure moves with them.
Packaging EPR is national, not EU-wide
One register per country, and in six of the 27 it does not exist yet. The table gives the register, the threshold and whether a foreign producer needs a representative — dated, with the source at every line.
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