The packaging waste problem was realized a couple decades ago. The effectiveness of waste policy instruments and EPR schemes for packaging and packaging waste is still being discussed in Europe. Finland like other EU Member states has transposed EU waste legislation into the national law. An EPR system for packaging and packaging waste in Finland was introduced in 1997. Plenty of changes to this EPR scheme were set by the new Finnish Waste Act in 2012. The revised waste legislation tries to address defects of the primary EPR system. Unclear allocation of responsibilities between various involved actors, intensified recovery rather than recycling and free-riding problem are among those issues. This thesis aims to explain the development of the Finnish EPR system for packaging waste and to analyze the effectiveness of the scheme. Introduced changes and perceptions of various stakeholders are presented in this paper too. Finally, lessons that could be learned from Finnish case and good experiences from other European EPR systems that might be useful to know are discussed in the end.