From today, 12 August 2026, the European crackdown on PFAS in food packaging comes into application, provided for by the new EU Regulation 2025/40 on packaging and packaging waste, the PPWR.
The rule establishes that from now on packaging intended for contact with food cannot be placed on the European Union market if it contains PFAS in concentrations equal to or greater than the limits set by the regulation.
We know it well by now: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are a very vast family of compounds used for their water-repellent and oil-repellent properties and have, over the years, also ended up in papers, cardboard and other materials intended to come into contact with food.
They are the well-known “eternal pollutants”, so called because many of these compounds degrade with extreme difficulty and can persist in the environment for very long times.
What are the new limits
The Regulation introduces three different thresholds.
To recap:
But be careful: the value of 50 ppm does not automatically mean that any sample with more than 50 mg/kg of total fluoride is illegal. If this threshold is exceeded, in fact, it must be clarified how much of the fluoride detected is actually attributable to PFAS and how much instead derives from other substances.
Furthermore, the regulation does not limit itself to banning packaging to which PFAS have been intentionally added. Instead, it establishes a maximum concentration in the final product, which means that, for compliance purposes, it matters how much PFAS is actually present in the packaging, regardless of how it got there.
The substances may have been used deliberately to impart certain properties to the material, but they may also appear as impurities, process residues or contaminants of the raw materials. In short, for companies it will not be enough to declare “we do not use PFAS”: what matters is that the packaging that reaches the market respects the established limits.
What happens to packaging already on the market
The European Commission has clarified that packaging placed on the market before 12 August 2026 can continue to be marketed and does not need to be recalled. On the contrary, those placed on the market from today must comply with the new thresholds, even if they were physically produced before this date. In fact, there is no provision for a transitional phase to exhaust the stocks not yet placed on the market.
And the rules also apply to packaging that contains recycled material: the Commission specifies that there are no specific exceptions for this category.
The new European legislation does not eliminate the problem of PFAS in packaging in one fell swoop. But it marks an important change of approach: it is no longer enough to ask whether these substances have been intentionally used, we need to measure how much actually remains in the material that reaches the market.
