What a recycled content percentage is really telling you
Two listings can both say 80% recycled and mean very different things. The question that separates them is where the material came from.
Recycled content is the easiest sustainability number to put on a datasheet and one of the easiest to read wrongly. The percentage tells you how much of the material was not newly made. It does not tell you where it came from, and that is the part that decides whether the number means anything.
Post-consumer is the one that counts
Post-consumer material has been used by someone and put in a bin: old boxes, bottles, newsprint. Using it creates demand for collected waste, which is the thing that makes collection worth doing.
Pre-consumer, sometimes called post-industrial, is offcuts and trimmings from the factory itself. Reusing them is good manufacturing practice, and mills have always done it, because the alternative is paying to throw away material they already bought. It is much weaker as an environmental claim, and it is the number quoted when a supplier wants a big percentage.
Ask which one the figure is, and ask for the split if it is both. A supplier who knows the answer immediately is telling you something about how closely they track their own inputs.
Why nobody offers 100%, and why that is fine
Recycling shortens paper fibres. Board made entirely of recycled fibre is weaker, so a box carrying weight usually blends in some virgin fibre for strength — and a box that fails in transit has a far worse footprint than one with a bit of new fibre in it, because the thing inside it gets made and shipped twice.
The same applies to film. Recycled polyethylene brings colour and specks with it, which is cosmetic, but it also brings variation, which matters for a seal that has to hold. For most mailing bags 80% is comfortable and 100% is a conversation about which batches you will accept.
So a high percentage is not automatically the better listing. A 70% box that survives the journey beats a 100% box that splits.
What to ask for
- The post-consumer share, as a number, not just "recycled".
- Whether the figure is by weight of the finished item or of one component. A box quoted on the board alone is not quoting the tape or the print.
- Whether it is checked. Our score halves any pillar whose evidence is self-declared rather than verified by us, and a supplier with a mill certificate to hand is in a different category from one with a claim on a website.
- Whether the item is one material. A single-material item at 60% recycled is often a better end-of-life outcome than a laminate at 90%, because it can be separated at all.
On any listing in the catalog, the recycled share and whether we have checked it are both on the page, and you can filter the catalog by a minimum percentage. Reading that number next to the end-of-life routes is how you tell a genuinely circular item from a well-marketed one.
