Packaging Design Costs: What Your Colour Choice Costs Per Kilo

What packaging design costs is not just what your designer invoices

Packaging design costs almost always count as one amount: design, dieline, proof, done. That is the smallest part. The largest part of what your packaging costs comes back on your waste management fee, every year, for as long as the design is on the market.

The Netherlands does not charge one rate per package. It charges a rate per kilo per material type, and on top of that a discount per design feature. Paper and cardboard cost EUR 0.017 per kilo. Flexible plastic costs EUR 1.320 per kilo. That is nearly 78 times as much for precisely the same job: protecting something until it reaches your customer.

And within plastic there is a second layer. Of the five discount steps you can earn on that per-kilo rate, two can be operated by nobody but your designer: your colour choice and your label. Brand black and a sleeve that covers the whole bottle are no longer a matter of taste. They show up as an amount on your annual statement.

This article lays out that bill in full. What a kilo costs per material, which design choices are billed separately, what the difference is on one real package, and from what volume it starts to matter to you. Every figure comes from Verpact itself and from the Dutch government, not from an agency passing them along.

What does a kilo of packaging cost in 2026?

Verpact publishes one rate per material type per kilo. That is the base everything rests on, and the spread within it is wider than most brand owners expect.

The full rate card for this year:

Two things stand out. The first is the jump between cardboard and plastic. Between the cheapest and the most expensive line sits almost a factor of eighty, and that is exactly the choice presented in most packaging projects as an aesthetic or logistical trade-off. Rigid plastic costs EUR 1.220 per kilo, so the tidy shelf-friendly jar lands in the expensive category too.

The second is aluminium. That rate rose this year to EUR 0.340 per kilo. Verpact explains why itself: cans leave the aluminium stream through the deposit system, and what remains is a smaller, lower-quality stream that is more expensive to process. That is the mechanism behind the entire scheme in a single example. What sorts badly gets more expensive.

On top of the material rate, single-use plastic carries a separate surcharge. For drinking cups, beverage packaging, rigid and flexible food packaging and lightweight carrier bags, Verpact charges EUR 2.100 per 1,000 units. That surcharge sits outside the weight and, more importantly, outside the exemption threshold. More on that below.

Which design choices appear separately on your bill?

This is where it gets interesting for anyone who designs packaging rather than buying it. The Netherlands did not wait for European eco-modulation. Verpact already runs its own discount scheme on plastic, and that scheme is cut up into design features.

The maximum discount a single disposal unit can earn is EUR 0.60 per kilo. It is built out of five steps:

The largest single step is recycled content, at EUR 0.20 per kilo. The other four sit at EUR 0.10 per kilo each.

Read that table again and count along. Colour is a design decision. Label, sleeve and print are design decisions. That is two of the five steps, together a fifth of the maximum discount, and they are taken in the same meeting where somebody says the bottle has to be black because that feels premium.

The conditions are as concrete as you would hope. The colour discount requires a predominantly colourless, natural or white base. The label discount sets requirements for the material of your label, for how much of the pack it covers, and for the ink on it. Solid carbon black and visible metallisation above that coverage threshold disqualify the whole step. The exact thresholds are in the scheme itself, in the coverage table on page eighteen.

There is also a floor under the whole scheme. If your packaging does not clear the target-material threshold, you get no step at all. A laminate with a vapour-deposited aluminium layer therefore falls outside it, no matter how white your label is. And materials such as PVC, PETG and oxo-degradable plastic disqualify you outright.

That changes the conversation. Not "can this be more sustainable" but "which of these five steps are we leaving on the table, and why". That is a question with an amount underneath it, and that is a question a brand owner is willing to answer.

What is the difference on one real package?

Abstract per-kilo rates convince nobody. So run the numbers on a package Verpact itself uses as an example in the scheme: a bottle with a closure and a label, twenty-three grams in total.

Two designs for exactly the same product.

Design X is brand-first. Black bottle, sleeve covering the entire bottle, label in a different plastic from the bottle. This design earns no discount step at all and pays the full rate for rigid plastic.

Design Y is sorting-first. Natural or white bottle, one type of plastic, a label that does not disrupt sorting, recycled content in the material, and a good score on the Recyclecheck. This design earns the full discount.

What that saves per year, at three volumes:

There is an honest conclusion to draw here, and it is not the one a packaging supplier gives you. On the bottom line of your starting volume, the difference is smaller than one hour of agency budget. For a webshop that is just getting going, the waste management fee is not an argument, and anyone pretending otherwise is selling fear.

The point sits in the top line of that table. That same design, at the volume you are working towards, costs you an annual amount that would pay for a complete redesign. And redesigning at that moment is more expensive than it sounds, because by then there are moulds, printing plates, photography, listings and a shelf full of recognition attached to it.

That is the reason to make this trade-off at the start rather than at the end. Not because it costs money now, but because it will cost money later and by then you cannot get out of it without redoing everything.

Why cardboard moved from a sustainability argument to a purchasing argument this year

Something changed in the purchase price this year that gives the advice "take the plastic out" a different character.

We have been advising that switch for years, and we sold it as a sustainability argument, with the honest caveat that it usually came at a premium. That caveat no longer holds.

The producer price index published by CBS measures what manufacturers in the Netherlands charge for their output. For the cardboard and packaging industry that index stood at 119.0 in July, against 119.5 a year earlier. A year of moving sideways, with a year-on-year change of 0.4% down.

Plastic packaging did something entirely different. That index stood at 132.5 in July, against 117.0 a year earlier: a year-on-year change of 13.2% up. The series broke out of a flat line in spring: 116.9 in March, 124.0 in April, 128.5 in May and 130.1 in June.

Two lines pulling apart, in other words. Cardboard is not moving, plastic packaging is getting significantly more expensive within a quarter. Add the difference in per-kilo rate on top and the switch you have been postponing for two years is no longer a sacrifice. It is a saving on both sides at once.

Two caveats belong with that. The CBS figure for July carries provisional status, and the June figure for plastic has already been revised down by a tenth since its first publication, and an index across a whole industry is not a quote from your supplier. What it does show is the direction, and this year that direction is in our favour for the first time.

From what volume does this matter to you?

Here sits the misunderstanding we run into most often. Business owners assume they are too small for this whole discussion, and usually that is right, and sometimes it is entirely wrong.

The exemption threshold sits at 50,000 kilos of packaging material per calendar year. Stay below it and you owe nothing. That applies to foreign parties supplying Dutch consumers directly as well.

Three things go wrong here.

First, all packaging counts. Not just your nice primary box, but the shipping carton, the void fill, the tape and the pallets too. That means it is usually your shipping carton that pushes you over the threshold, not your product. Box size and board grade are therefore the most expensive design decision that nobody calls a design decision.

Second, the threshold does not apply to single-use plastic. If you pack something in flexible plastic for food, you declare it from the very first unit, including the surcharge per thousand. For food and supplement brands the bill can therefore start at a volume where a cardboard salesman would tell you there is nothing to think about.

Third, staying below the threshold is not an exemption from administration. According to the government you have to be able to record how you calculated that you stay below it. That means weight and material per component, per item. Precisely the data that comes out of a properly built packaging file, and precisely the data that is missing when your packaging was bought piecemeal from three suppliers.

We supply that data as standard in a packaging project, because we need it to design anyway. For the client it is a by-product that saves them work on their declaration. On how that obligation relates to enforcement practice on the marketplaces, we wrote earlier in the blind spot around PPWR enforcement.

The date that changes your design brief

So far this has been about money you can save. There is also a part that is not a choice.

The European packaging regulation ties market access to a recyclability grade per package. Three grades are coming, each with a score as its boundary: grade A from 95%, grade B from 80% and grade C from 70%. Anything scoring below that counts as technically non-recyclable.

From 1 January 2030, packaging that reaches none of those three grades may no longer be placed on the market. Read that precisely: the regulation says 1 January 2030 or twenty-four months after the corresponding delegated acts enter into force, whichever is later. So the date can shift, the direction cannot. From 1 January 2038, grade C is no longer enough and you need to be in grade A or B. The same regulation makes modulated rates mandatory rather than voluntary: the contributions producers pay will follow the recyclability grade.

Do the arithmetic backwards. A packaging line you sign off today will run well into the next decade. Even if that first date moves by a year, it falls within the lifespan of virtually every design coming off the table now. A laminated stand-up pouch or a black tray approved this month has to be done again before then.

That is no reason to panic and every reason to get the order right. Anyone starting in 2029 will be queuing at the same printers and the same designers as the rest of the country. Anyone folding it into the next packaging round they were doing anyway pays almost nothing extra for it. In the 2030 rules for recyclable packaging we go into more detail on what those grades mean for the construction itself.

What we do differently now that we keep the rate card on the table

I have spent six years designing packaging for e-commerce brands with Oase Creative, and I ran a brand of my own before I started designing for others. In all that time the first question in a packaging project never changed: what should it look like.

We no longer ask that question first.

The first question now is how many units per year, in what material, and what the weight per component is. Not because that is more fun, but because the answer determines whether the rest of the conversation is about taste or about money. For a brand shipping four thousand units a year, the waste management fee is noise and the design can go full out. For a brand scaling towards retail distribution, that same choice is a recurring line item we would rather set correctly straight away.

The second change is in how we treat black. Black is the most requested brand colour in this segment and simultaneously the most expensive. Not because the ink costs more, but because it costs you the colour discount and, with certain pigments, your Recyclecheck too. That is a conversation you have once, with an amount attached, instead of three times with a feeling attached.

The third is that we now treat the coverage of sleeves and labels as a design parameter, just like bleed or margin. A sleeve running to just under the threshold looks barely different in practice from a sleeve covering the whole bottle, and it saves a discount step. That is exactly the kind of choice a designer does have a say in and a buyer does not.

And the fourth: we supply the weight per component per material as standard. That is not a service, it is a spreadsheet we make anyway. For the client it is the difference between filing a declaration and being able to substantiate one.

All of this hangs off the brand side. The reason black, contrast and full-bleed come up so often is that brands think standing out is the same as shouting loudly. In what packaging design does to where the buyer looks we set out why that usually is not true, and why a calmer design often performs better. That makes the discount steps less painful than they sound: the choices that save you money are frequently the choices that make your packaging better.

What you can do this week

Four things, in order of how much time they take.

First, take your best-selling item and weigh the packaging. Every part separately: primary packaging, closure, label, shipping carton, void fill, tape. Note the material and the weight. That is half an hour of work and it is the basis for everything above.

Next, multiply that weight by your annual volume and set it against the rate card. Now you know whether this subject is noise or money for you. Both answers are useful, and the second one arrives sooner than most brands expect.

Then look at your plastic packaging and walk through the five discount steps. Which do you earn now, which are you leaving, and of the ones you are leaving: which are a design choice and which are technical? The design choices can be folded into your next print run at no extra cost.

And finally, put September in your calendar. That is when Verpact publishes the definitive rates for next year, and this autumn brings a new tier on the recycled-content discount where more recycled material earns a higher discount. Anyone who already knows what their packaging weighs can work out that same afternoon what it means. See also our broader calculation on packaging design for the revenue side of the same decision, and what your shipping size costs at bol for the side that has nothing to do with material.

If you would like us to run this calculation for you on an existing packaging line, that is a short assignment with a concrete answer. Have a look at packaging design to see what a project with us involves, or bring the question straight to us.