The Guidelines

Clear, practical and robust design guidance for circular packaging

The ‘Designing for a Circular Economy’ guidelines (D4ACE) provide actionable information, helping businesses make practical, sustainable design choices – ready for 2030 and beyond. Insights provided to support everyone working to achieve this include:

Material selection and recyclability

  • Clear recommendations for polyolefin-based flexible packaging to enhance recyclability and support high-quality recyclate output.

Inks, adhesives and barrier materials

  • Guidance to ensure compatibility with household flexible packaging waste recycling systems
  • Insights to support necessary packaging functionality and achieve efficient recyclability

Design for sortability

  • Advice to improve sorting outcomes, ensuring flexible packaging is correctly identified and separated in the recycling process

The result? A roadmap for legislation-ready packaging design – developed by and for the entire value chain and underpinned by ongoing in-depth testing and analysis

D4ACE are open-access and transparent guidelines here for anyone serious about making flexible packaging fit for the future.

We encourage every actor to:

  • Use the guidelines and ‘design check’ tool to evaluate and improve your packaging portfolio
  • Share them with teams, partners, suppliers and customers
  • Treat them as a shared, evolving map – not a fixed destination

Because design is where circularity begins, and if we don’t get it right at the start, we compromise everything that follows.

Designing for 2030: navigating new practices and staying ahead of the curve

The latest guidelines are built using insights from the most extensive flexible packaging specific sortability and recyclability testing programme in Europe and provide:

  • Refined material compatibility thresholds for barrier layers, coatings, adhesives, inks, metallisation, and tie layers
  • Updated evidence on PET, EVOH, PVDC, and PA based on testing results, replacing expert opinion-only guidance
  • Integrated sortability criteria for near infra-red (NIR), eddy current, and metal detection
  • Increased clarity on limits e.g., adhesives/coatings ≤5% by weight, PA6 in PE ≤35% with specific tie layers

The result? A detailed and practical guide to meet your flexible packaging design challenges of today – and tomorrow – supported by testing of over 600 packaging samples and 1,760 data points.