Green vs amber vs red packaging under RAM

How the stages combine

RAM 2027 assesses an item through automatic red criteria and then four stages: collection, sortation, reprocessing and application. Each stage returns its own result, and the combination rule is deliberately unforgiving:

• Any red at any stage makes the item red. There is no averaging and no offsetting a red at sortation with a green everywhere else.
• All stages green makes the item green.
• Anything else is amber, which in practice means at least one amber and no reds.
• No evidence is not neutral. Where there is nothing to support a green or amber conclusion, the item is red.

Some materials never reach the later stages. Flexible plastics, wood and other materials such as bamboo, cork and silicone are rated at collection only: red unless there is take-back scheme evidence, in which case amber. They cannot be green under RAM 2027, so a bamboo cap is not a route to a better rating however well it is engineered.

What BeautyPack does with a missing fact

The methodology treats an unsupported claim as red. Software that silently applies that rule is not much use to a packaging technologist, because red because it is red and red because nobody has asked the supplier are very different problems.

So when a required fact is missing, the BeautyPack encoding of the published RAM 2027 guidance returns insufficient data for that rule and names the missing fact, and the assessment as a whole is marked as having a data gap unless a red is already conclusive. That is a working state, not a rating. When you export or approve, you are approving a rating; the gaps are yours to close first.

Three worked beauty examples

A tinted PET serum bottle: red on one fact

Take a 45 × 45 × 120 mm amber-tinted PET bottle with a PET label of the same polymer and a PP cap that floats. There are no automatic red criteria. Rigid PET is collected at kerbside by at least 75% of UK local authorities, so collection is green. It clears 40 mm in two dimensions and the label is the same polymer as the container, so sortation is green. No EVOH, no silicone and no dense non-PET closure, so reprocessing is green. Then application: a PET bottle in any colour other than clear or translucent light blue is red, because only clear or light-blue PET produces bottle-grade recyclate. Four green stages, one red, and the item is red. Move the same pack to clear PET and, with the same facts recorded, it is green.

A white HDPE bottle with a paper sleeve: amber

A 60 × 60 × 200 mm white HDPE conditioner bottle with a paper sleeve covering about 70% of the surface. Collection green, size green, no NIR-blocking carbon black. The sleeve is a different material covering more than 60% of the surface, which interferes with near-infrared sorting and is amber at sortation. Nothing else fails: no PVC, no polystyrene, no metallised label, no red inserts, an adhesive that releases in a 70–90°C hot wash, no polyamide barrier and no decorative direct printing. One amber, no reds, so the item is amber. Reduce the sleeve below 60% coverage, or add clear consumer removal guidance to an enrobed paper sleeve, and the sortation result changes.

A mascara with a nylon wiper: red at reprocessing

A PP mascara barrel with a nylon wiper insert. Collection and sortation are unremarkable. At reprocessing, HDPE and PP items with inserts, liners or seals made of nylon, PS, PVC, PU, heavy PET, PC, PMMA, thermoset or silicone are red. The wiper is small, essential to the product and invisible to the consumer, and it decides the rating on its own. This is the single most common surprise in beauty: the part that fails is rarely the part on the brief.

What each colour means in practice

Commercially, the rating drives fee modulation. Amber is the base fee. Red pays a multiplier of 1.2 times the amber rate. Green attracts a discount that is variable and depends on how much red-rated packaging is on the market overall, so it cannot be known in advance; PackUK estimated it at around 9% for 2026/27 in illustrative material. Plan on amber, model red as the downside, and treat green as upside you cannot bank.

Operationally, the colours mean something more useful. Red is a design decision to revisit. Amber is usually a documented trade-off that is worth writing down so the next person does not reopen it. Green is a position to defend at the next specification change, because it is easy to lose to a supplier substitution nobody flagged.

What to do next

• Rate by tonnage, so effort follows fee exposure rather than pack count.
• Separate genuine reds from data gaps before you brief anyone on redesign.
• Record why an amber is accepted, with the evidence, at the time you accept it.
• Re-run assessments whenever a component specification changes, not annually.

Run a single pack through the RAM 2027 readiness checker to see which of your facts are present and which are assumptions.