Practical guidance for the packaging decisions you have to make.

APCO membership applies to businesses that supply packaging into the Australian market above a set annual turnover. Members report each year on the packaging they place on the market and how it performs against the Sustainable Packaging Guidelines. If you are unsure whether you are covered, the threshold and the obligation are set out in APCO’s own membership criteria.

Extended Producer Responsibility makes the business that puts packaging on the market responsible for the cost of collecting and recovering it. It is already in force in the United Kingdom and across the European Union, a growing number of United States states have enacted their own schemes with Oregon and Colorado already charging producer fees, and Australia is moving towards a mandatory scheme. The practical consequence is that packaging decisions now carry a direct, recurring cost.

Eco-modulation means the fee you pay is adjusted by how your packaging performs, rather than being a flat charge on the tonnes you place on the market. Packaging that is easier to recycle and uses less problematic material costs less. Packaging that is harder to recover costs more. It turns packaging from a fixed cost into one you can influence by design.

Yes, if you sell into the European Union. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation applies to packaging placed on the EU market regardless of where the business is based. It sets requirements on recyclability, recycled content, minimisation and substances of concern, and it asks for evidence rather than assertion.

The Australasian Recycling Label tells a consumer which part of a pack goes in which bin. Producing one requires each component of the packaging to be assessed against local recovery infrastructure, which means component-level data has to exist before a label can be issued.

Every component of every pack, what each one is made of, what each one weighs, and where that information came from. Material type and total weight per product is no longer sufficient, because fees, labelling and recyclability assessments are all calculated at component level.

A single product often includes a bottle, a closure, a label, an applicator, a carton and a transit pack, each in a different material and often from a different supplier. Assessed as one lump, it is impossible to say what is recyclable or what a fee should be. Assessed component by component, both become calculable.

It is the normal starting point. Phantm’s AI reads specification sheets, certificates and supplier declarations as they are, structures what it finds, and shows what is missing. Nobody has to fill in a blank form before beginning.

Suppliers respond more readily to one clear request that shows exactly what is missing on which product than to a spreadsheet with no context. Phantm sends that request, lets the supplier review and confirm values rather than retype them, and attaches each answer to the product it belongs to.

Every value carries its source and its confidence, from AI-generated through manually entered, supplier confirmed, expert reviewed and third-party verified. You can see at a glance what is solid, what is estimated and what is still missing, and the supporting evidence sits behind the number.

That is the point of capturing it once. The same component-level record supports APCO reporting, ARL assessment, UK EPR and EU PPWR, because those regimes ask different questions of the same underlying materials, weights and evidence.