Recyclability and kerbside: what your packaging claims must mean

The four phrases go onto cartons as if they were interchangeable. They are not. “Recyclable” is a claim about the material: in principle it can be reprocessed into something else. “Recycled content” is a claim about what went into making it. “Kerbside collected” is a claim about a collection service in one place. “Widely recycled” is a claim about how many households have that service.

The difference matters because nobody reads a claim in a laboratory. Your customer reads it standing over a bin, in one street, in one country, with a set of rules printed on the lid. A claim that is true of the material and wrong at that bin still sends the pack to the wrong stream, and it is the printed instruction people follow, not the material.

Recyclability is a property of a material and its construction. Collection is a service, decided market by market and often local authority by local authority, and paid for through contracts with sorting and reprocessing plants. The two move independently. A material can be entirely reprocessable and still have nowhere to go in half the towns you ship to, because nobody there collects it.

So the honest way to write a claim is to say what the packaging is made of, then give a disposal instruction only where you can verify it. If you sell into several countries, one carton carrying one instruction is almost always wrong somewhere. Check the rules for every market you actually ship into before artwork goes to print, and check them again when a market changes them.

Recycled content looks backwards, at the fibre or polymer that went into the material. Recyclability looks forwards, at what a sorting plant and a mill can do with it afterwards. A pack can be high in recycled content and awkward to recycle. It can be made entirely from virgin material and go through a paper mill without trouble. Neither number predicts the other.

Treat them as two separate questions. Ask per grade rather than per range, and get the answer in writing with a date on it. Recycled content varies between grades of the same product and moves when a supplier changes source. A percentage quoted once in a meeting for “our kraft” is not evidence you can print on a pack that will run for two years.

Paper recycling works by re-pulping fibre in water, so anything that stops the fibre separating cleanly is a problem. A plastic film laminated to paper is the clearest case: it looks and feels like paper, but the plastic has to be dealt with and much of the material is rejected. Wax, heavy coatings and some barrier layers behave the same way. “Mostly paper” is often not paper as far as the process is concerned.

Contamination is the other half. Grease and food residue, a plastic window, a strip of plastic tape across the flaps, a bubble bag left inside: each can move a carton out of the paper stream, or force the household to take the pack apart, which most people will not do. Damp is a separate problem at the collection end, and one to raise with your waste contractor.

The practical fix is to put fewer materials in the parcel. Toreto's paper range, SwiftWrap honeycomb, Swiftpack crinkle fill, Envigour paper bubble and Swift paper strapping, is built to keep a pack in paper rather than mixing paper with plastic, and the Biosphere water-activated kraft tape closes it with paper too. What any given collection then accepts still has to be confirmed locally.

Stretch wrap rarely reaches a household bin; it comes off in the warehouse. That makes it easier in one way, because you have a single point of collection and can bale it, and harder in another, because whether the bales are accepted, and at what price, depends on your waste contractor and on how clean the film comes off. Ask what they will take before assuming it is handled.

The bigger lever is usually how much film goes on in the first place. In Toreto's own wrap tests, on the same pallet and the same machine, Supersonic and Aerosonic at 16µ held 10 kg/sq in on 66 g of film a pallet, against 9.9 kg/sq in on 200 g for 23µ solid film. That is film you never buy and never have to find a home for. Costs vary with film price and pallet size.

Treat the claim as a document, not a design element. Write down the exact article it refers to, including coatings, adhesives and any laminate. Confirm the position for every market you ship into, not only your own. Get the supplier's answer in writing, dated, and against that specification rather than against a product family.

Then set a review date. Claims outlive the specification they were written against: a grade changes, a supplier switches source, a coating is added to solve a machine problem, and the artwork keeps saying what it said last year. A claim you cannot evidence on the day somebody asks is worse than no claim at all.

Ask what the article is made of, layer by layer. Ask whether any layer is a laminate or a coating, and what the adhesives and inks are. Ask for recycled content per grade, with a date. Ask what has changed since your last order. And be more comfortable with a supplier who marks something unconfirmed than one who answers every question with a yes.

Toreto states construction per article, in writing, including where the answer is that something still needs checking. That is less impressive than a badge on a brochure and considerably more useful on the day a customer's compliance team asks you to prove the sentence printed on your box.