Green Deal: PPWR secondary acts deprioritised

As part of a broader push to simplify EU regulation, the European Commission has scaled back its ambitions for secondary legislation under the Green Deal.

In April 2025, Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall announced a plan to reduce by one third the number of delegated and implementing acts in the environmental field, defining the detailed rules necessary to put into operation primary EU legislation.

Internal lists shared with the European Parliament on 24 April and 23 May reveal the concrete outcome of this effort.

Nearly 200 delegated and implementing acts remain classified as “priority” by the Commission’s services.

However, around 60 texts have been designated as “non-priority” and will no longer be actively pursued.

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is affected.

A dozen of the regulation’s planned secondary acts remain on the priority list, including:

• rules for extended producer responsibility (EPR) registration (Q1 2026)
• harmonised labelling (Q3 2026), and
• calculating recycled content (Q4 2026)

Three PPWR acts have been deprioritised:

• an implementing act on digital labelling to help sort packaging waste
• a delegated act on pooling systems for reusable beverage packaging, and
• an implementing act on mandatory green criteria for public procurement

Also deprioritised are several secondary measures linked to the EU Battery Regulation, Electrical and Electronic Waste & Restriction of Hazardous Substances via the RoHS Directive, as well as waste shipments and international waste management.

While the Commission has not explicitly said that these acts will be abandoned, it has opened the door to amending or removing the legal obligation to adopt some of them, particularly where a binding deadline exists.

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