Materials
Recycled plastic carries whatever was in the plastic it used to be. The UN said so in May 2026. The concern is specific and tied to feedstock, not a general case against recycled content — and metal and glass do not have the problem at all.
Recycled content is one of the few sustainability claims on packaging that is usually literally true. It is also the one place where the environmental choice and the food-safety choice can pull in opposite directions — and that tension is not something brands are keen to explain.
In May 2026 the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization published a report saying so directly. Here is what it found and what it means for what you buy.
Recycled plastic carries whatever was in the plastic it used to be. If some of the feedstock was not food packaging, the contaminants come along.
The clearest demonstration of this is the one we wrote about separately: restricted flame retardants turning up in black plastic kitchen utensils, almost certainly because the feedstock included recycled electronic waste, where flame retardants are supposed to be. Nobody added them to a spatula. They arrived with the material. Our full piece on that study covers the detail, including the two corrections it later needed.
The report, published 14 May 2026, calls for globally harmonised standards for recycled food-contact materials, on the grounds that the gap is real. Its director of food systems, Corinna Hawkes, put the trade-off plainly:
Two specific findings from it are worth carrying away. First, on particles: microplastics “are not unique to recycled plastics but are a possible outcome of physical plastic recycling practices” — that is, the mechanical grinding and re-melting itself generates them. Second, on chemistry: the report cites research finding recycled PET bottles consistently containing benzene, with organophosphates appearing more often in recycled than virgin PET. UN News covered it here.
This is the part most people get wrong, in both directions.
The FDA does not approve recycled plastic as a category. It issues No Objection Letters — each one tied to a specific polymer, a specific feedstock, a specific recycling process and a specific food use. The guidance is here and the register of submissions is public.
Some of those letters are narrower than you would guess. A given process might be cleared only for “Food Type VIII” — raw produce and shell eggs — rather than for all foods. A No Objection Letter is not a general blessing on recycled plastic, and it is not transferable between processes.
The gap that critics point to, fairly, is that the framework leans heavily on the recycler’s own demonstration that its process removes contaminants. There is no independent verification requirement attached to the letter. Civil Eats reported this out in some detail.
Regulation (EU) 2022/1616 requires EFSA to assess recycling technologies and facilities, rather than approving a material outright. The unit of assessment is the process, as in the US, but the evaluation is done by the regulator rather than accepted from the applicant.
Closed-loop bottle-to-bottle PET recycling — food-grade bottles collected, cleaned and made into food-grade bottles — is the well-characterised case, and it is what most “recycled content” on a drinks bottle actually means. The uncertainty is concentrated in mixed and post-consumer streams where the input was not all food packaging, which is where black plastic kitchenware sits.
Not, we think, to avoid recycled content. The environmental case for it is strong and the food-safety concerns are specific rather than general. What the evidence supports is being alert to which stream the material came from, and treating vagueness as a signal.
Practically, the distinction you can actually observe is between a brand that says where its recycled material came from and one that says only that there is some. Klean Kanteen says 90% recycled steel and names Intertek as the verifier of that content — steel, note, not plastic, and content verification rather than safety testing. Our Place says its aluminium is “100% certified post-consumer recycled” and does not name who certified it. Those are different quality claims wearing similar words, and it is the kind of gap we score across the whole list.
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