The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2025/40, which entered into force on 11 February 2025 and applies from 12 August 2026 replaces the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive 94/62/EC that the European packaging industry has been operating under since 1994. The new regulation is significantly more demanding than the directive it replaces. All packaging placed on the EU market must be recyclable in an economically viable way by 2030.
Plastic packaging must contain minimum levels of recycled content with targets escalating through 2030 and 2040. Reusable packaging must reach at least forty percent of the total by 2030 and seventy percent by 2040. Unnecessary and excessive packaging is restricted. The confusing labelling that the existing system produces is standardised.
These requirements apply to the businesses that place packaging on the EU market — which includes every company that provisions a charter vessel in a European port with packaged goods. The implication for the Mediterranean charter industry, which operates the majority of its fleet from ports in Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Spain, Italy, and France, is the implication that applies to every food and beverage provisioning operation in the EU: the packaging in which the charter boat’s provisions arrive must comply with the PPWR requirements from August 2026.
What the Charter Boat’s Provisioning System Currently Looks Like
The conventional charter boat provisioning is built around the single-use packaging that the supermarket and the cash-and-carry and the provisioning company supply as the default: the individually wrapped portions, the shrink-wrapped produce, the polystyrene cool boxes for the perishables, the plastic bottles for the water and the soft drinks, the single-use cups and the disposable food service packaging that the APA-funded provisioning budget purchases and the charter boat’s waste management system has to dispose of at the end of the week in the marina that may or may not have the segregated waste facilities that the responsible disposal requires.
Half of all marine litter is from packaging. This is the European Commission’s own figure, published on the EU environment packaging waste page. The charter boat that operates in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean is operating in the marine environment that this litter enters. The packaging that arrives aboard the charter boat in single-use form is the packaging whose end-of-life trajectory is, in a significant proportion of cases, the sea it sails on. The regulatory requirement is the PPWR. The moral case is the ocean.
What the Charter Industry Has Not Yet Addressed
The PPWR requires the packaging to be recyclable, reusable, and correctly labelled. It requires the businesses that provision the charter vessels to use packaging that meets the new standard. It does not, at this stage, apply directly to the charter operator who receives the provisioned goods — the regulatory obligation sits with the supplier rather than the vessel operator.
But the charter operator who takes delivery of non-compliant packaging from the provisioning company is the operator participating in the supply chain that the regulation is designed to change. The compliant charter operator sources the compliant provisioning. The non-compliant provisioning company loses the market to the compliant one.
Most charter boats operating in Mediterranean and Caribbean waters have not yet addressed the specific provisioning practices that the PPWR targets. The water in plastic bottles that the charter boat carries for the guests rather than using the watermaker that the self-sufficient offshore boat has. The individually portioned breakfast items in single-use plastic that the provisioning company delivers because it is the default and because the charter captain has not yet specified otherwise.
The cool box that is polystyrene because polystyrene is cheap and the APA budget is tight and no one has yet made the reusable alternative the default choice. The labelling that tells the guest nothing about where to separate the waste because the charter boat’s waste management system has not been designed around the separation infrastructure that the marina requires.
None of this is the moral failure of the individual charter captain. It is the systemic default of the charter industry’s provisioning model, the model that was built for the convenience of the weekly turnover and the APA management rather than for the sustainability of the marine environment the boats operate in. The PPWR is the regulatory signal that the model needs to change. The August 2026 application date is the signal that the change is not optional.
