Prefer to watch instead? We broke this down in the episode of Unpacked below.
We were refilling the peanut M&M’s dispenser in the studio, and one of us lingered on it a little longer than usual.
The plastic had a slight tint. When you’ve handled as much packaging as we have, you start to notice subtle shifts. It wasn’t cloudy or opaque, but the perfectly clear, glassy look from virgin resin was missing. Recycled content tends to leave a fingerprint. Sometimes it leans beige. Sometimes it leans blue. Sometimes it’s just a little less uniform.
The front call out also caught our attention: “Jar made with 100% recycled plastic.”
It’s a small badge, but there’s more behind it than the line suggests, especially when you’re talking about post-consumer recycled content in packaging.
Post-consumer recycled content (PCR) means the material went out into the world, did its job, and came back through a recycling stream before being processed again.
It might have been a water bottle, or another food container. It was collected, sorted, cleaned, ground, melted, and turned back into resin that can be formed into something new.
Material that has completed that full lifecycle doesn’t always behave exactly like virgin resin. You can see slight shifts in color that can also affect clarity. In certain applications, you have to account for how it affects wall thickness or stress points, especially in rigid food packaging.
When we see a claim like 100% recycled plastic on a rigid jar, we’re not just reading the badge. We’re thinking about sourcing stability, color control, and what adjustments may have been made during forming to make that performance reliable.
There’s another category of recycled content that sounds similar but operates very differently.
Post-industrial recycled content, sometimes called PIR, never actually leaves the manufacturing environment.
If you’ve seen a thermoformer in action, you’ve seen it. Sheets get formed into parts and what’s left behind is a skeleton of trimmed material. That scrap gets reground and fed back into the manufacturing cycle. The same thing can happen with injection molding runners or start-up purge material.
On paper it sounds similar, but from a material standpoint it plays out differently.
Post-industrial recycled material hasn’t been exposed to food residues, cleaning agents, outdoor conditions, or whatever else might happen once packaging goes out into the world. It’s typically more consistent because the input stream is known and controlled within the factory.
That doesn’t make it better or worse. It just makes it different.
Then there’s chemical recycling.
Instead of mechanically grinding and remelting material, chemical recycling breaks plastic down closer to its base building blocks and rebuilds it into new resin.
By resetting the material to its base state, you can reduce some of the variability that shows up in mechanical recycling. The resulting resin can behave much more like virgin material, which matters in packaging applications where clarity, strength, or consistency are critical.
Chemical recycling is often positioned as a solution for materials that are difficult to recycle mechanically, and it plays a different role in the broader packaging sustainability conversation.
Recycled content is showing up more in mandates, reporting, and long-term material planning conversations. The call out on the front of the package doesn’t capture the sourcing, processing, and forming decisions behind it. Those details live upstream, and they leave subtle traces if you know what to look for.
Once you start noticing them, you won’t be able to unsee the cues that hint at a material’s past life. That badge carries a little more context than it did a minute ago.
But also… sometimes we really are just refilling the M&M’s dispenser. The peanut kind, to be exact.
