APCO Supplier Onboarding FAQs

The GS1 National Product Catalogue (NPC) is a service provided by GS1 Australia to assist brand owners with maintaining and sharing product information with all trading partners in real-time. This service is available to both members and non-members of GS1 Australia.

APCO is the entity in charge of managing and administering the Australian Packaging Covenant (the Covenant), which is a national regulatory framework under the National Environment Protection (Used Packaging Materials) Measure 2011 (NEPM). This framework defines the collective responsibility shared by governments and businesses across Australia in managing the environmental impact of packaging. This pivotal role bridges industry participants along the packaging supply chain with Commonwealth, state, and territory governments, endorsed by environment ministers.

NPC is used by over 2,280 companies to support the need for standardised supplier managed data across the whole supply chain. Product master data can be captured and seamlessly exchanged with trading partners on NPC.

NPC has many data attributes to capture product master data. GS1 Australia has worked with APCO to include packaging specific data attributes.

APCO members that use NPC can capture packaging specific data attributes related to their Global Trade Identification Numbers, helping better manage your packaging master data and support you with preparing your annual reports to APCO.

Additionally, you can use the NPC to help share product master data with trading partners, helping you with meeting traceability reporting and compliance, improving data accuracy and minimizing data errors and duplication.

By collecting product packaging master data in the NPC, GS1 members can use this information for both Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) Annual Report and Covenant Reporting.

If you are an APCO member, you can re-watch the Webinar “Getting Regulation Ready” (24:08 - 25:54) with more information on APCO reporting and NPC.

You can register online for the National Product Catalogue.

The fees associated with National Product Catalogue can vary. Please contact us for more information.

Yes, NPC supports the establishment of multiple user logins upon request. Please contact our NPC Support Team at npccustomersupport@gs1au.org.

Yes, training will be provided through a webinar format, offering opportunities for interactive Q&A sessions. APCO and GS1 have provided joint webinars, which you can find on the resources page of APCO’s website.

Please note that NPC does not store sales data, only the packaging master data related to the product. Therefore, your packaging master data stored in NPC will need to be extracted and overlayed with your sales data to inform your annual reporting to APCO.

For more assistance on this, and if you are interested in a guided session or have any specific questions about how NPC can be used to support you with your APCO reporting, please contact npccustomersupport@gs1au.org requesting assistance and a member of the NPC Support Team will be in touch.

Data can be entered directly into the NPC user platform or using an excel upload.

Please contact our NPC Support Team at npccustomersupport@gs1au.org to confirm if your company is subscribed to NPC and the method of access (some companies may have ERP integrated or using solution providers).

GTIN stands for Global Trade Item Number. It is a number (the one found in a barcode) that can be used by a company to uniquely identify products throughout the supply chain and at point-of-sale.

As the catalogue owner, you have complete control over which trading partners can access your catalogue and records. Until you publish an item to a trading partner and the publication date within the item has been met or passed, the trading partner do not have access to the data.

For more information on how to publish your data to your trading partner via NPC, please contact our NPC Support Team at npccustomersupport@gs1au.org.

No, it is not compulsory to use NPC for APCO reporting. Using NPC is an option to streamline the reporting activities.

If you have any queries/issues regarding your NPC catalogue, please contact our NPC Support team at npccustomersupport@gs1au.org.

Alternatively, if your query is urgent, please go on live chat or contact the team via phone at 1300 227 263, select 3 for Services and 1 for NPC.

If you have any queries/issues regarding your APCO report and how GS1 NPC can help with your requirements, please contact our Member Services team at memberservices@apco.org.au