A specification is the packaging one product ships in. It is a record in its own right because the same 500ml bottle or shipper carton is usually used by dozens of products - weigh it once, and every declaration in every market is computed from the same numbers.
Each specification holds components: the bottle, its cap, its label, the carton, the tape.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Material | Every scheme reports tonnage split by material |
| Weight and unit | Grams, kilograms, ounces or pounds - normalised to grams internally, so enter it in whatever unit the supplier gave you |
| Quantity | How many of this component per unit of product (six caps on a six-pack) |
| Level | Primary reaches the consumer, secondary groups, transit is the pallet |
| Household | The UK charges producers for household packaging only; transit packaging is not household packaging |
| Recyclability | Drives eco-modulation - green is discounted, red is surcharged |
| Recycled content | Discounted by some schemes, and the EU sets minimums for plastic from 2030 |
Each specification scores itself out of 100 and names what is missing. The failure mode in this work is not a wrong number, it is a missing one: a declaration built on a catalogue where a third of the lines have no packaging data is wrong in a way nobody notices until an auditor asks.
The dashboard counts incomplete specifications and products with no specification at all.
Set EPR Exempt with a reason - a service line, a digital product. It is a decision, and it is recorded as one. It is not a way to make missing data go quiet: an exempt product is excluded from declarations and from the gap list, so the reason had better be true.