Recycled Content: What Counts Toward a Mandate, What You Can Print, and What Can Touch Food

A recycled-content percentage is not one fact, it is three. Whether a pellet counts toward a state content mandate, whether you can print the number on the pack, and whether the material may touch food are decided by three different authorities applying three unrelated tests. A resin can satisfy the first and be inadmissible under the second. Buying against one rulebook and assuming the others follow is the most common and most expensive mistake in this area.

What counts toward a recycled-content mandate?

California's AB 793 is the clearest example of a content mandate, and it is deliberately narrow. CalRecycle requires plastic beverage containers subject to the state refund value to hit a postconsumer recycled content standard of 15% from January 1, 2022, 25% from January 1, 2025 and 50% from January 1, 2030, with shortfalls penalised at $0.20 per pound of the gap.

Two details do most of the work here. The standard is postconsumer only — CalRecycle's own guidance answers the question flatly, pointing to the statutory requirement for a postconsumer standard, so factory regrind and trim scrap buy you nothing. And compliance is measured across the portfolio, not per bottle: the total number of containers must, on average, meet the standard per year, in the aggregate. A mandate of this shape is an accounting exercise as much as a materials one, which is why the reporting obligations run alongside it — pounds, by resin type, under penalty of perjury, with documents retained for five years.

The penalty exemption is worth knowing if you are small: manufacturers who sold 16,000,000 containers or fewer in the reporting year are exempt from administrative penalties, though not from reporting. Note what that does and does not buy you. It excuses you from the mandate's arithmetic. It does not excuse anything you have chosen to say on the label.

Can you print the recycled percentage on the pack?

This is a separate question with a separate regulator, and it is the one brands tend to get wrong after doing the mandate maths correctly. In the US, on-pack environmental claims are judged against the FTC's Green Guides, which are about deception rather than about hitting a target.

The guidance treats it as deceptive to say an item contains recycled content unless the material was recovered or otherwise diverted from the waste stream, either pre-consumer or post-consumer. Pre-consumer material is not excluded outright the way it is under the California mandate — but if you rely on it you need substantiation that it would otherwise have entered the waste stream, and the guidance's first worked example is a manufacturer reclaiming its own spills and scraps, where a recycled claim is deceptive precisely because that material was never headed for the bin.

For a partially recycled pack, the claim has to be clearly and prominently qualified by percentage by weight of the finished product or package. Averaging is permitted, and this matters more than it looks: the guidance's own example blesses a card labelled 50% recycled fiber where that figure is an annual weighted average across several suppliers, accounting for losses in production. In other words, an averaged number is not inherently a deceptive one — provided you can produce the average.

Where brands get into trouble is the unqualified visual. A chasing-arrows loop with no explanation reads as both recyclable and fully recycled, and needs substantiation for both messages. If you are working through on-pack sustainability language more broadly, our guide to signalling eco-friendly without getting flagged for greenwashing covers the wider set of claims.

Does chemically recycled resin count?

This is where the innovation runs ahead of the rulebooks. Advanced or chemical recycling breaks waste plastic back to feedstock, which then enters a cracker alongside fossil feedstock and comes out indistinguishable. No molecule in your bottle can be traced to a specific yoghurt pot. The recycled share is therefore allocated on paper, under a mass-balance scheme, and the allocation rules differ between certification bodies and between jurisdictions.

In our view the honest position is that the allocation question is unsettled, and a buyer should treat it as commercial risk rather than settled fact. The practical consequence is not ambiguous, though. Both rulebooks above ultimately rest on documentation — California's on reportable pounds by resin type retained for years, the FTC's on substantiation you can produce on demand. Whatever allocation method your supplier uses, the question to ask is not whether it is certified but whether the paperwork it generates would survive being read out by a regulator.

The food-contact picture is the one genuinely settled piece, and it is more permissive than most buyers expect. The FDA reviews recycling processes case by case against a threshold: a contaminant must not migrate into food at a dietary concentration exceeding 0.5 ppb, which the agency equates to negligible exposure for recycled plastics in food packaging.

For chemically recycled PET specifically, that review has already been done generically. The FDA states that surrogate contaminant testing is no longer considered necessary for PCR-PET or PEN made by a tertiary recycling process, and that having determined such processes yield material of suitable purity, it no longer evaluates them or issues individual opinion letters. If a supplier is selling you a food-contact clearance letter for chemically recycled PET as a premium feature, that is worth a conversation. Our piece on what enzymatic PET recycling means for packaging buyers goes further into where that capacity is actually coming from.

What should the resin contract say?

Four things, and none of them are exotic. Specify postconsumer or pre-consumer explicitly rather than writing "recycled" and hoping — the two are not interchangeable under a state mandate. Require the allocation method in writing where the material is chemically recycled, named rather than gestured at. Contract for the documentation, not just the pellets, with a retention period that outlasts your reporting obligations. And keep the number you print on pack downstream of the number you can evidence, not the number you bought.

The usual rule of thumb is that the claim should be the last thing decided, not the first. Recycled content also interacts with recyclability, which is a different property again and increasingly a regulated one — our guide to mono-material flexible packaging covers that side. A pack can be made of recycled material and still fail a recyclability test, and the two claims are policed separately.

None of this is an argument against recycled content or against advanced recycling. It is an argument for knowing which of the three tests you are being asked to pass at any given moment, because the resin that clears one is not automatically the resin that clears the next.