The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation became applicable across the bloc on 12 August, bringing with it a set of obligations that will push transport packaging steadily away from single use and towards reusable systems. A UHF RFID deployment at Dutch flower and plant logistics specialist Hoek Group, built on equipment supplied by Cisper Electronics B.V. and tracking software from RTiOT, is a timely illustration of what the reusable model actually demands once a business commits to it. If you send an asset out, you need to know where it is, who has it, and whether it is coming back.
What changed on 12 August
Regulation (EU) 2025/40, generally shortened to PPWR, entered into force in February 2025 and became applicable on 12 August 2026 after an 18 month transition. It is a Regulation rather than a Directive, which matters more than the terminology suggests: it applies directly in every Member State without national transposition, so there is no local implementation period to hide behind and no meaningful variation between markets. It bites on manufacturers, importers and distributors placing packaging on the EU market, and it explicitly covers industrial and commercial transport packaging, not just the consumer packaging that tends to dominate the headlines.
The reuse obligations arrive in stages. From August 2026, reuse systems must be in place for certain packaging formats. The binding targets land in 2030, when at least 40% of transport, sales and e-commerce packaging must be reusable, rising to as much as 70% for certain transport and beverage categories, with a 70% aspiration across the board by 2040. Four years is not long in logistics terms, particularly when the change is not simply a swap of materials but a change of business model. A single use crate leaves your building and stops being your problem. A reusable one leaves your building and becomes an asset on your balance sheet that somebody else is currently holding.
100,000 boxes and a manual scanning problem
Hoek Group buys and sells flowers and plants worldwide, shipping into markets including the UK, Ireland, Germany and Denmark. Its returnable packaging pool runs to roughly 100,000 reusable plastic boxes. Before the RFID rollout, tracking that pool meant scanning containers by hand, a process that was slow at exactly the moments when speed mattered most and, like all manual data capture, produced errors that only surfaced later as unexplained stock discrepancies.
To be clear about the framing, this was not a PPWR compliance project. Hoek was already running reusable packaging because it suits the product and the trade lanes, and the deployment predates the regulation becoming applicable. That is precisely what makes it worth looking at. It shows the operational shape of the thing the regulation is now nudging thousands of other businesses towards, and it shows that the hard part is rarely the packaging itself. The hard part is the inventory control that reusable packaging quietly requires.
The hardware: fixed reads at packing, portals on the return leg
Each box carries a UHF RFID tag, and the deployment reads those tags at the two points in the cycle where the data is worth having.
At the packing tables, CAEN R1250I readers capture the tag as the box is filled, and RTiOT’s Posito software links the box identity to the customer order. The association is made once, at source, with no keyboard involved. From that moment the business knows which customer is holding which containers, which is the single piece of information that makes a returnable pool manageable.
On the return leg, two RFID portals handle the sorting. A “Dirty Box Portal” reads used containers as they come back in, and a “Clean Box Portal” verifies sanitised boxes as they rejoin the available pool. The portals are built around an Impinj R700 reader paired with Times-7 A5010 antennas, a sensible pairing for this kind of doorway application where you want a controlled read zone that captures everything passing through without spilling stray reads into neighbouring areas. Chainway C72 handhelds provide backup scanning for anything that needs to be picked up away from a fixed read point, whether that is a stack in an awkward corner of the warehouse or an exception that needs resolving on the spot.
Posito integrates with Hoek’s warehouse management system, so the read data does not sit in a separate silo. It feeds real time stock levels and analytics in the system the business already uses to run its operation.
The commercial case, not just the green one
The sustainability argument for reusable transport packaging is straightforward and is the one PPWR is built on. Cutting single use packaging out of the supply chain removes waste at source rather than trying to recycle it afterwards, and the environmental payback of a durable crate improves with every trip it survives.
The financial argument is the one that actually gets projects funded, and it is a genuinely good one. Reusable packaging replaces a recurring consumable cost with a capital asset, so the unit economics improve on every rotation. The catch is that the model only works if the assets keep rotating. Shrinkage is what kills the ROI, because a box that never comes back has to be replaced at full cost and drags the average trip count of the whole pool down with it. Hoek’s reported outcomes read exactly along those lines: better traceability of outbound and returned boxes, manual scanning eliminated, real time visibility of stock levels, lower operational and labour costs, and, importantly, customers who can be held accountable for how long they hold onto containers. That last point is worth dwelling on. Once you can evidence retention with timestamped read data rather than argue about it, the conversation with a customer sitting on 400 of your boxes changes character entirely.
For businesses now working out what PPWR means for them, the lesson from the flower trade is that switching to reusable packaging is the easy half of the decision. Building the read infrastructure that lets you find, count and reclaim those assets is what determines whether the switch pays for itself or slowly bleeds money into other people’s warehouses.
Read more at https://www.cisper.com/en/case-studies/rfid-case-study-automating-inventory-control-for-reusable-flower-boxes
