Recycled-content claims have a credibility problem, and it's earned. "Made with recycled materials" can mean almost anything: a token outer skin over virgin film, a percentage measured against whatever denominator flatters it, an additive that lets the word "degradable" onto the bag while making the film worse for actual recycling.
So here is our claim, with the qualifiers doing the work: our highest-PCR mailer construction runs up to 57% post-consumer recycled resin, by polymer weight, with recycled content in all three layers of the co-extruded film.
Why each qualifier matters
- Post-consumer — resin recovered from material that reached an end user, not factory offcuts reground and fed back in. Regrind is good practice; it is not PCR, and blending the two definitions is the oldest trick in the claim.
- By polymer weight — the percentage is measured against the resin in the bag, not against some component of it chosen to make the number bigger.
- All three layers — a co-extruded mailer has an outer face, a core, and an inner face. Putting recycled resin only in the core (or only the skin) and quoting the layer's own percentage is how a 20% bag gets marketed as a 50% bag. Ours carries recycled resin in each layer.
What we deliberately leave out
No oxo-degradable or oxo-biodegradable additives, in any construction. Oxo additives fragment film into smaller pieces rather than returning it to anything; several jurisdictions have banned them outright, and film carrying them contaminates the recycling stream this whole exercise is supposed to feed. A bag can be recyclable or it can be "degradable" in the oxo sense — pretending to both is marketing.
The honest limits
Two things we say plainly because a buyer's audit will find them anyway. The 57% figure is our declaration as the manufacturer, supported by a certificate of analysis on request — it is not a third-party certification, and we don't dress it as one.
And recycled resin is a real engineering input, not pixie dust: it arrives with more variability than virgin resin, which is exactly why it matters that the plant blending it also extrudes, prints and converts the film. When one roof owns the whole chain, a formulation problem surfaces on our line, not on your bagger.
What it costs
On our standard mailer, the recycled construction carries no premium. That isn't a subsidy — it's what the blend economics actually produce at our volumes, and it removes the last excuse for shipping virgin film with a leaf printed on it.
If your brand publishes packaging claims, ask every supplier the three questions above: post-consumer or regrind, percent of what, in which layers. The suppliers with good answers won't mind. That's rather the test.