Children's Health Defense
By Meg Wilcox
Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.
Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, has approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website.
Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of 7 to 8 per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.
Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India and other countries.
The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30% recycled “soft plastic packaging.”
The Coca-Cola Co. in North America reports it sells soft drinks in 100% recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, while General Mills says its Annie’s cereal boxes use a liner made from 35% recycled plastic film.
Increasing recycled content in packaging may be good news for the planet, but researchers say the FDA has a lax approval process for plastic food packaging that hasn’t kept pace with the science on chemical hazards in plastics.
The agency’s approval process for recycled plastics is voluntary and ignores the potential risk of chemical mixtures, researchers told Environmental Health News (EHN). Companies can seek guidance on their recycling process, but they are not required to.
In addition, the FDA relies on manufacturers’ test data when it approves materials, leaving companies essentially in charge of policing themselves. Meanwhile, some studies show that recycled plastic can harbor even more toxic chemicals — such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, benzene and others — than virgin plastic.
FDA spokesperson Enrico Dinges defended the process, telling EHN the agency “reviews [industry] data against stringent scientific guidelines” and can “use its resources to spot test materials” if it sees an issue.
But researchers say the agency fails to protect the public from the toxic chemical soup found in recycled plastics.
“[The] FDA is most concerned about pathogen contamination coming with the recycled material, rather than chemicals,” Maricel Maffini told EHN.
The approval process “is very lax,” she said.
Recycled plastic is more toxic
Globally, just 9% of plastic is recycled. Most are recycled mechanically, by sorting, washing, grinding and re-compounding the material into pellets.
Most recycling centers collect a mix of materials, allowing milk jugs, say, to intermingle with detergent bottles or pesticide containers and potentially absorb the hazardous chemicals from those non-food containers.
Recycling facilities that are set up to collect one plastic type, such as PET bottles, can better control potential contamination, although chemicals could still be introduced from bottle caps or the adhesives in labels.
Hazardous chemicals can also be introduced when plastics are decontaminated and stabilized during recycling. Plastics degrade with recycling, “so you may need to add more stabilizers to make the material as robust as the virgin material,” Birgit Geueke, senior scientific officer at the non-profit Food Packaging Forum, told EHN.
“Recycling can therefore increase the material complexity and the presence of different additives and degradation products.”
Geueke, who led a review of more than 700 studies on chemicals in plastic food contact items, said that research on recycled plastics is limited. Despite that caveat, “there are a few studies really showing that contamination can be introduced more easily if you use recycled content.”
One study found 524 volatile organic chemicals in recycled PET versus 461 in virgin PET. Chemicals detected in the recycled PET included styrene, benzene, BPA, antimony, formaldehyde and phthalates — chemicals linked to an array of health issues, including cancer, and the ability to hack hormones and cause development delays in children, obesity and reproductive problems.
Most studies have focused on recycled PET, which is “not as prone to picking chemicals up,” in comparison to other plastics such as recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene, or PP, Geueke said.
“HDPE milk bottles really take up chemicals during all stages of their life cycle, much more than PET bottles, and [those chemicals] are harder to remove, because they stick harder to the material,” she said.
Indeed, a study on recycled HDPE pellets obtained from various countries in the Global South identified pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals in the pellets…
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