ZWE: Ensuring safe recycled content in food packaging: ambition vs reality
A new report from Zero Waste Europe focuses on safe recycled content in food packaging. When it comes to Food Contact Materials (FCMs), the use of recycled content potentially creates new pathways through which humans can be exposed to hazardous chemicals in contaminated recycled material flows.
Today, recycling technologies have not proved to be able to remove all toxic chemicals already present in plastic in the first place and current regulations shift this responsibility away from plastic producers to recyclers, who struggle to process many unrecyclable or difficult-to-manage plastics.
Regulatory framework must be ambitious enough to urgently phase out the most hazardous chemicals to ensure food packaging and other food contact articles are truly safe for use, reuse and recycling.
The full report is available in English. The Executive Summary is available in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and German.