How much packaging do you place on the market? The 50,000-kilo limit explained
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by Verpakkingdeals.nl
6 min reading time
Above 50,000 kg of packaging per year, there is a declaration obligation. This is how you calculate in half an hour how much packaging your webshop puts on the market, and how to reduce that weight.
You ship forty parcels a day, you buy a pallet of boxes every quarter, and one day your accountant asks: do you actually declare your packaging? That's a valid question, and the answer depends on one number that most webshops have never calculated: the number of kilograms of packaging you put on the Dutch market each year.
This article explains what counts, where the limit is, and how to make an estimate yourself in half an hour. This is not legal advice — the official information, listed at the bottom, always applies to your situation.
What actually counts as packaging?
Many entrepreneurs only think of the box when they hear "packaging." In practice, it refers to everything you use to protect, carry, or offer a product, and that the customer throws away or reuses. So this is broader:
the shipping box, letterbox box, or shipping envelope;
the tape, the void fill, and the shrink wrap around it;
the packaging in which the product itself is contained — the box, the bag, the bottle;
the outer box and film of pallets, if you pass them on yourself;
and also the packaging of products you import and dispose of or onward deliver here.
Importers often forget that last point. If you bring goods from abroad yourself, their packaging enters the market here — even if you dispose of the box yourself with the old paper.
The limit: 50,000 kilograms per calendar year
According to the explanation on Ondernemersplein (Entrepreneurs' Square) of the Dutch government, the obligation to declare and pay a waste management contribution applies if you put more than 50,000 kg of packaging on the Dutch market per year, or dispose of more than 50,000 kg of packaging after import. You declare this to Verpact, the organization formerly known as Afvalfonds Verpakkingen; you must register there first.
There is one point where the threshold does not apply: for single-use plastic products, also known as SUP, Ondernemersplein states that there is a reporting obligation even below 50,000 kg. If you sell plastic cups or other single-use plastic, for example, that is a separate consideration.
Rules regarding packaging have been evolving in recent years, partly due to the European Packaging Regulation. Therefore, always check your own situation with Verpact or the Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate, and do not rely on what a supplier or a forum says.
Calculate it yourself: weigh one package
50,000 kilograms sounds abstract. Make it concrete with a calculation you can do in half an hour.
Weigh your packaging separately. Take your most commonly used box, with the tape and void fill you typically use, but without the product. Note the weight in grams.
Multiply by your quantities. Get your sales report from last year and count how many shipments you sent per size.
Add the product packaging. If your product itself is also in a box or bag, that counts.
As an example to get a feel for it: a webshop that sends 20,000 packages per year with an average of 250 grams of packaging per shipment will total approximately 5,000 kilograms. That is well below the limit. Someone who sends 20,000 shipments with an average of 2.5 kg of box, outer box, and void fill is already around 50,000 kilograms. The difference is therefore not in the number of orders, but in what you use per order.
Important: this is an estimate to know if you are close. If you are close to the limit, that is the time to properly investigate instead of estimating.
Keep it simple, from now on
Reconstructing how much cardboard you've used retrospectively is tedious work. Keeping track proactively is almost free if you link it to your purchasing rather than your orders.
Record the weight per item once and then only update the quantities. If you keep purchase orders, you already have those quantities. This is immediately useful for your cost price per package, so the work is not in vain.
Less weight per package, without compromising
Whether or not you are close to the threshold: less packaging weight means lower purchase costs and often a lower shipping rate. Four interventions yield the most.
Choose the right size box. Every excess centimeter is filled with material you have to buy, which adds weight. If your product fits in a letterbox format, a recycled A5+ letterbox box (bundle of 100, €24.00) saves significantly compared to a regular box with void fill.
Use less tape, not more. One neat strip over the seam plus a short wrap around the sides holds better than three haphazard layers. Good 48 mm wide tape, such as packaging tape 50 meters x 48 mm (€3.00), only needs to be applied once.
Standardize your sizes. Four box sizes that you know well work better than ten sizes of which you always misjudge three. It saves on purchasing, warehouse space, and packaging weight.
If you want to show customers that a shipment arrived unopened, you can do so without extra cardboard: VOID security seals (60 pieces, €9.95) weigh almost nothing.
In short
Packaging is more than just the box: tape, void fill, and product packaging all count.
Above 50,000 kg per year, according to Ondernemersplein, there is a declaration and contribution obligation to Verpact; for single-use plastic, there is a reporting obligation even below that threshold.
Weigh one package, multiply by your quantities, and you'll know if you're getting close.
Keep track at the purchasing level, not per order.
Less weight per package lowers your purchasing and shipping costs anyway.
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