CITEO and packaging reuse: calls for projects and dedicated funding

Citeo is the eco-organization approved by the French State for household packaging. Its approval, renewed by the government until the end of 2029, comes with a specific obligation: to allocate part of its resources each year to developing reuse. For a company investing in reusable packaging, whether a container manufacturer or a producer looking to close a collection loop, this translates into several concrete schemes whose scope changes from one year to the next.

A framework set by law and by the specifications

The regulatory target that shapes Citeo's action is well known: the AGEC law (France's anti-waste and circular economy law) sets a target of 10% reused packaging by 2027. The specifications attached to Citeo's approval (cahier des charges) turn this target into an obligation of means. The eco-organization must fund the development of reuse solutions (réemploi and réutilisation), and contribute to covering the costs of take-back operations for reusable packaging. This last obligation is relatively recent in its precise wording, and it directly concerns companies that run a reuse loop day to day.

Calls for projects, renewed every year

Citeo structures much of its support around themed calls for projects, open for limited submission windows.

EncoRE plus de réemploi

This is Citeo's general call for projects on reuse. It is open to producers and solution providers alike, and covers approaches as different as bulk sales, in-store refill and deposit systems. Its third edition, with results announced in May 2026, selected 181 projects with more than €35 million committed. Across all three editions, Citeo reports having supported 550 projects for around €120 million. The scale of the scheme is a useful signal: Citeo does not treat reuse as a marginal topic, but selection remains competitive and the criteria vary from one edition to the next.

The Lavage (washing) call for projects

More recent and more targeted, this call specifically addresses washing capacity for reusable packaging. Washing is a bottleneck often underestimated by companies that move into reuse without planning for this industrial building block. The second edition, launched in March 2026, funded winners up to 50% of eligible expenses, with applications opening in early April and closing in late April 2026. The timeline for this type of call is tight: a company that wants to apply should follow Citeo's announcements several months ahead rather than discover the opening at submission time.

A strand dedicated to professional packaging

Beyond the major calls for projects, Citeo also runs more specific programs on the reuse of professional packaging, working with players in retail, food service and industry. This strand gets less media attention than EncoRE, but it directly concerns companies whose business relies on flow logistics, e-commerce and transport included.

Support for take-back costs

Separately from the calls for projects, Citeo has set up a recurring support mechanism, tied to its specifications, to cover part of the take-back costs of reusable packaging. The calculation combines an optimized collection cost specific to each reuse loop, a modulation rate that directs more funding toward the least mature loops, and a traceability cost. Citeo states that this support is designed as an incentive: it aims to help the sectors that need it most switch to reuse or scale up, and it takes into account the revenue already generated by reuse itself, so as not to fund what already pays for itself.

One point is worth flagging for a company looking closely at this scheme. In 2024, Citeo launched a trial called ReUse, limited to four regions in north-western France. According to a parliamentary question on the subject, operators outside this test area did not receive the same level of support to roll out their activity. The geographic coverage of Citeo's schemes is therefore not uniform across the country, and it is worth checking before building a national rollout plan.

What this means for a company investing in reuse

For a company that designs or uses reusable packaging, the practical challenge is to tell apart two approaches at Citeo. Calls for projects are one-off and competitive, and fund a project over a defined period. Structural take-back support applies once the reuse loop is up and running. The two can be combined, but not at the same points in a project's life cycle. The calendar of calls for projects changes every year, which calls for regular monitoring of Citeo's communications rather than applying on an ad hoc basis.

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