Summary
Details
- France
The COTREP Guide is intended for stakeholders designing and managing plastic packaging for the French market.
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Overview
COTREP was established in 2001 to support stakeholders in improving the recyclability of plastic packaging in the French market. It brings together actors across the value chain, including resin producers, packaging manufacturers, brands, and recyclers. The guide responds to a key challenge: packaging design choices can significantly affect whether materials are successfully sorted and recycled. To address this, COTREP has developed a large body of technical knowledge based on real-world testing conditions, including laboratory studies, pilot trials, and industrial-scale recycling operations. The guide itself is a synthesis of this work, translating over a hundred technical notices into practical eco-design recommendations.
Design principles
The COTREP Guide sets out a series of eco-design principles to help ensure that plastic packaging remains compatible with existing recycling systems. Rather than defining a formal scoring methodology, it translates technical studies and testing results into practical design guidance. At its core, the guide emphasises that recyclability depends on the entire lifecycle of the packaging, from collection and sorting to recycling and reuse of the material. Key principles include:
Design for existing recycling streams: Packaging should be compatible with established collection, sorting, and regeneration processes in France
Material selection: Preference is given to polymers and structures that are already widely recycled (e.g. PET, HDPE, PP)
Component compatibility: Labels, additives, colours, and closures should not interfere with sorting or degrade recyclate quality
Simplicity of structure: Mono-material or easily separable components are favoured over complex or multilayer designs
System integration: Packaging must be detectable, sortable, and capable of being processed into recycled material and reused
The guide also provides polymer-specific recommendations (e.g. for PET, PE, PP, flexible films), along with illustrative examples to show how design choices affect recyclability in practice. Overall, the approach is to support innovation while ensuring that packaging design does not compromise the efficiency or output quality of recycling systems.
Current status
The COTREP guide evolves through ongoing technical studies and packaging-specific guidelines, rather than a single periodically updated document. The main guide was last consolidated in 2022, while newer recommendations are published separately for specific formats such as tubes (2025) and pots and trays (2025).
These updates are based on continuous testing in laboratory, pilot, and industrial conditions, and are translated into targeted eco-design recommendations rather than a fully revised framework. Recent work focuses on expanding recyclability to additional packaging types and refining guidance for different polymers (e.g. PET, PE, PP), reflecting how materials behave in real French recycling systems.
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