Modulated fees arrive as one number on an invoice, months after the pack was decided.
Every packaging component is rated from the data you already hold, and those ratings roll up into one rating for the pack. A material the brain holds no criterion for comes back as assess, an honest unknown, never a guessed green.
RAM is PackUK’s Recyclability Assessment Methodology 2027, and it eco-modulates the UK pEPR fee from 2026-27. It is a UK method, so ratings are produced for the GB market only: other markets return no rating rather than a misapplied one.
Every market · every regime · cited absences
What it actually does
Mechanism, in the order it happens.
- Read the packaging you already entered
The same components that price your EPR fees. The score needs a material and a weight on each component; a product with no packaging yet shows no rating rather than a flattering one.
- Rate each component across four stages
Collection, sortation, reprocessing and application. The worst stage sets that component’s rating. A separate automatic-red rule applies to packaging containing certain substances or constructions, whatever the four stages say.
- Roll the components up into one pack rating
Any red component makes the pack red. Every component green makes it green. Anything else is amber. The fee follows the weakest link, which is deliberate: one metallised film or one carbon-black tray drags an otherwise recyclable pack down.
- Show the money it moves
Green takes a discount off the base fee, amber leaves it alone, red adds a premium, each using the brain’s own cited multiplier for that rate. A rate with no modulation carries a multiplier of 1.0.
- Hand it to Packaging Builder
Swap a material, change a weight or drop a component and see the new rating and the new fee side by side before you change anything real. Packaging Builder is included in every base plan.
What you see
A rating per pack, and per component
The pack’s rating, the share of graded packaging weight that is green, and every component listed with its material, its weight and its own rating, so you can see which one decided it.
The modulation it drives
The green and red multipliers on each cited rate, against the packaging weight you have actually placed on that market over the last twelve months.
A cited rule set you can link to
Each material family’s default rating with its reasoning and its GOV.UK citations, kept aligned to PackUK’s source by the brain’s daily sweep.
A route to a better pack
Making a heavy component green moves the headline more than fixing a light one, so the breakdown is ordered to show you where the weight is.
A Packaging Builder result is a concept to explore with a converter, never a finished packaging specification, and a green rating earns its discount only once the pack actually changes.
What it costs
+£19 a month, on any plan. Prices are in GBP and exclude VAT, and annual billing is charged as ten months for twelve.
During the public beta every module is switched on for every workspace, whatever add-ons you hold. This is the price that applies once the beta ends.
The regulatory brain is reference data shared by every workspace: what you see in it is what every other customer sees, with the same citations and the same confidence labels. A module decides which regimes the platform answers for, never how sure it is allowed to be.
What it does not do
It does not rate anything outside Great Britain. RAM is a UK method, so other markets return no rating rather than a misapplied one.
It does not certify anything. The RAM rating that modulates your fee is a different thing from the on-pack recycling mark a consumer reads.
It does not guess. A material the brain holds no criterion for comes back as assess, counted and flagged, left out of the roll-up, never a quiet green.