The push to increase recycled content in packaging has never been more urgent. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations, consumer pressure, and corporate sustainability targets are all pointing in the same direction: use more recycled material.
But a landmark report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is asking an important question that the packaging industry cannot afford to ignore: when we increase recycled plastic in food contact packaging, are we also introducing new chemical safety risks?
The benefits are real, but so are the risks
Recycled plastic in food packaging brings genuine environmental benefits. Reducing virgin plastic production, diverting materials from landfill, lowering the carbon footprint of packaging…these are outcomes worth pursuing.
The FAO's report doesn't dispute this. What it highlights however is that recycled plastic introduces a level of complexity that virgin plastic does not. When recycling streams aren't well controlled, unknown substances, including what the industry calls non-intentionally added substances (or NIAS) can migrate into food. These are contaminants that were deliberately not included in the packaging but arrived via contaminated recycling streams, inadequate sorting, or chemical reactions during the recycling process itself.
Right now, there are no globally harmonised standards for managing this risk. Different countries = different regulatory regimes = different levels of enforcement. For brands operating across multiple markets, this creates a significant compliance and reputational challenge.
What the FAO is calling for
The FAO's report makes three clear asks of the global packaging industry and regulatory community:
Updated regulatory frameworks specifically addressing recycled food contact materials
More research into contaminants and exposure scenarios across different material types and recycling processes
Better traceability across the recycled plastics supply chain to give brands and regulators visibility into material provenance and processing
These are not unreasonable asks but they do underscore just how much work remains to be done before 'recycled content' can be treated as a simple, unqualified good.
Circularity isn't just about content, it's about confidence
This is something we think about a great deal at Reath. The push toward circularity in packaging is the right direction of travel, but circularity done well requires more than a percentage figure on a data sheet.
It requires understanding the full picture: where did this material come from, what processing did it go through, what contaminants might be present and what does that mean for the specific application, whether that's a food contact container, a cosmetics bottle, or a pharmaceutical blister pack?
Data quality and traceability are foundational to this. A brand that cannot answer these questions with confidence is not just at regulatory risk, but at risk of making sustainability claims that don't hold up to scrutiny.
The data infrastructure question
At Reath, we believe that having robust, reliable packaging data is foundational to making genuinely better decisions, not just greener-looking ones. The difference matters enormously, both for consumer trust and for long-term regulatory compliance.
The FAO's call for better traceability across the recycled plastics supply chain is, in essence, a call for the kind of digital infrastructure that allows brands to know what's in their packaging and prove it. That's not a future requirement, it's increasingly a present one.
Reath helps brands build the packaging data infrastructure they need to make confident, audit-ready claims about materials, recycled content, and environmental impact. Find out more at reath.id