Closing the plastic Loop

Recycled Plastic Packaging, Certifications, and Emerging Recycling Technologies

As the packaging industry accelerates toward circularity, the integration of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastics and transparent certification systems has become essential to achieving both environmental and regulatory goals. In Europe, initiatives such as RecyClass and CEFLEX are setting the standard for a more credible, traceable, and high-quality recycling ecosystem — bridging regulatory requirements with technological innovation.

Building Trust with Certified Recycled Plastics

To meet the recycled content targets established by the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) and the Single Use Plastics Directive, companies must demonstrate not only the use of recycled materials but also their origin, traceability, and processing quality.

RecyClass provides a harmonised certification framework based on EN 15343, ensuring transparency and accountability across the plastic value chain. Two key certifications form its foundation:

• Recycling Process Certification – verifies recyclers’ traceability systems, waste classification, and environmental performance.

• Recycled Plastics Traceability Certification – ensures the verified use of certified recycled materials from recyclers through to converters and producers.

These third-party certifications provide demonstrated traceability and verified recycled content claims, strengthening trust among consumers, brand owners, and policymakers.

Defining Recycled Content and Material Origin

RecyClass follows EN 14021:2016, which distinguishes between:

• Pre-consumer material: manufacturing waste diverted from the production process before reaching consumers.

• Post-consumer material: waste generated after product use that has fulfilled its intended purpose.

By-products are excluded from recycled content calculations, maintaining credibility and avoiding greenwashing.

To meet the diverse needs of the market, RecyClass also offers add-on certification modules, including:

• Module A (Food Contact) – for pre-processing and decontamination aligned with EU 2022/1616.

• Module B (Cosmetics and Household) – for non-food applications.

• Module C (Corporate Social Responsibility).

• Module D (PVC requirements).

  
  

National Legislation and Market Implications

National-level policies such as France’s eco-modulation of EPR fees (2025) and Spain’s Plastic Tax are driving demand for certified recycled content. These regulations reinforce the need for harmonised traceability standards like those provided by RecyClass, ensuring brands can confidently report and verify their PCR usage.

CEFLEX: Technology Innovation to Improve Recycling Quality

While RecyClass focuses on verification and certification, CEFLEX (Circular Economy for Flexible Packaging) is advancing the technological frontier of recycling. The initiative analyses and supports the deployment of emerging advanced mechanical and physical recycling technologies that can increase both yield and quality of recycled polymers.

Key technologies assessed by CEFLEX include:

• Advanced Wet Friction Washing – improves feedstock cleanliness and quality for conventional recycling, at low CAPEX and high scalability.

• Deinking – removes surface printing inks, improving colour, odour, and mechanical performance.

• Delamination – separates multilayer structures to recover purer material fractions.

• Extraction – targets high-performance applications just below the chemical recycling threshold.

• Dissolution – recovers polymers close to virgin quality and can potentially produce food-contact materials.

By 2030, these processes could add hundreds of thousands of tonnes of higher-quality recyclate to the European market — provided that feedstock quality, sorting infrastructure, and design-for-recycling are improved simultaneously.

Chemical Recycling and the Mass Balance Debate

In parallel with mechanical and physical recycling, chemical recycling is gaining recognition as a complementary pathway, particularly for complex and mixed polyolefin (PO) waste streams that are difficult to recycle mechanically.

CEFLEX and other industry bodies highlight that chemical recycling should target the most demanding applications— such as food-contact packaging — where mechanical recycling cannot achieve the required purity. However, these technologies are energy-intensive and still limited in scale, making mass balance accounting a critical enabler for market adoption.

Mass balance allows producers to attribute recycled content to final products based on input-output accounting within integrated production systems. While it supports scaling up circular feedstock integration, it also raises challenges around transparency, double counting, and comparability.

The European Commission and industry stakeholders are currently working toward harmonised EU-wide rules for mass balance to ensure credibility and prevent misuse of recycled content claims.

The Role of Design: Enabling Recycling Efficiency

CEFLEX emphasises that better design is fundamental to everything. The “Designing for a Circular Economy (D4ACE)” framework promotes simplifying packaging structures and materials to improve recyclability and the economic viability of advanced recycling processes.

Design, rather than technology, remains the primary enabler. Multi-material and multi-layer (MMML) flexible packaging remains a challenge, and even with new processes like dissolution and delamination, mixed polyolefin (PO) waste is likely to remain a feedstock primarily for chemical recycling.

Feedstock Quality: The Cornerstone of Circularity

CEFLEX stresses that new recycling technologies are not stand-alone solutions — they depend on consistent, high-quality feedstock that is still scarce in Europe. Achieving commercial viability will require a step change in quality, not just quantity, supported by advanced sorting and collection systems.

A combination of technological innovation, improved design, and robust certification will be necessary to build a truly sustainable packaging future.

Towards a Transparent and Circular Plastics System

The convergence of RecyClass certification frameworks, CEFLEX’s technical advancements, and emerging chemical recycling pathways is redefining how the packaging value chain approaches circularity.

Together, they demonstrate that the future of recycled plastic packaging depends on three key pillars:

1. Verified traceability of recycled content.

2. Innovative recycling technologies that deliver material quality.

3. Circular design and harmonised policy frameworks that connect both ends of the value chain.

In this new system, trust and transparency are the true enablers of progress — ensuring that every claim of recycled content is not only possible, but provable.