john lewis booked £29m of packaging levy in six months. most brands cannot even check their own number

The European Outdoor Group has spent three years getting its members to agree one way of exchanging sustainability data, so that brands and retailers stop re-answering the same questions in different spreadsheets. The standard, SDEX, was launched with Germany's BSI in July 2023 and has until now lived as a free Excel tool. It is going digital, and vvast has been selected as one of the platform partners to build it. The Outdoor Industries Association's pilot announcement of 20 July 2026 names vvast and CircKit as the two UK platforms recruiting participants; vvast's contacts are listed as founder Richie Jones and fractional Chief Sustainability Officer Adam Hall. vvast is now recruiting a first cohort. Places are limited, there is no charge, and the company's published estimate is that a brand saves 800 or more hours a season on data and compliance work — roughly 21 working weeks of one person's time, for a single season. The commercial argument sitting underneath it is about invoices rather than fines. "Compliance is becoming one of the most expensive parts of running an ecommerce brand," Jones wrote on 16 April 2026, listing EPR, plastic tax, greenwashing legislation, right to repair, the Digital Product Passport, CSRD and the Carbon Border Adjustment. "For most brands, this creates a huge amount of manual data processing, often managed through spreadsheets stitched together across multiple teams." The scale of the line is now visible in public accounts. John Lewis Partnership reported that the packaging EPR levy added £29m to its costs in the first half of 2025/26, recognising the full annual cost in its interim accounts; Waitrose carried £22m of pEPR and National Insurance costs and the John Lewis division £7m, against a £34m loss before tax and exceptionals (letsrecycle.com, Beth Jones, 11 September 2025). Jones's argument is that the exposure for smaller brands runs in two directions at once. "You either risk mistakes that result in hefty fines, or you end up paying more tax than necessary because of overestimating from inaccurate data," he wrote on 6 August 2026. "If a retailer of their scale is feeling the impact, can you imagine how hard it is for the smaller businesses to keep up with an ever-growing list of regulations?" The mechanism that makes data a price rather than a chore is specific. Since 1 April 2026, UK packaging EPR fees have been modulated by recyclability, and gov.uk's guidance states that household packaging "which has not been assessed or where the detail required to undertake an assessment isn't available" must be classified red — the most expensive band (gov.uk RAM guidance, last updated 4 September 2025). On PackUK's Year 2 illustrative fees, plastic runs £415 a tonne green, £455 amber and £545 red: a £130 spread on identical material, decided by what a producer can evidence (House of Commons Library briefing CBP-10352, 29 July 2026). Jones has been making the comparison to data protection since August. "Remember the absolutely chaos that was GDPR?? We knew it was coming. But it felt like tomorrow's problem - until it wasn't," he wrote on 25 August 2026. "Well, get ready for round 2. Except this time, it's not personal data, it's product data." He is careful, though, about where the argument ends. "Compliance is the floor. The bare minimum. It shouldn't be the ambition," he wrote on 8 September 2026. "That means getting far enough ahead of legislation that compliance becomes a by-product of running a better, more resilient business." The pilot is open now at vvast.net/eog/. Interviews are available with Richie Jones (founder and CEO, the finance and strategy case), Ed Pitt (co-founder and CTO, the ingestion pipeline and SDEX integration) and Adam Hall (fractional CSO, the regulation and claims detail).