Sustainability Buzzword Bingo – 'Recycled Content'

Much like the food at lunch I buy that promises to be ‘reduced fat’, ‘low carb’ or ‘high in protein’, and actually just turns out to be an ever so slightly 'healthier' version of ‘cake’ than the normal one I buy, the claims made by many companies in the sustainability space are increasingly abusing the language that the educated consumer used to be able to use to identify a product with actually good environmental credentials.

Reading many product websites is increasingly like playing a game of ‘Sustainability Bingo’. Claims of ‘locally sourced, organically grown, grass fed, regeneratively farmed, fully traceable, vegan, carbon neutral, fairly traded materials’, often turn out to be just as dubiously ‘good’ for the environment as the aforementioned cake was for my waistline...

What do these terms mean and how easy are they to be abused? Is it possible to catch out the worst offenders? What and who can we actually trust when using them?

Over the next few weeks I’m going to explore some of them… let’s start with…

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‘Recycled Content’

Given that my own employer is one of the original creators of a waste based high performance material, describing a product as having ‘recycled content’, or being made of ‘waste’ is something that’s quite meaningful to me, and close to my heart. These days however I am increasingly seeing claims of ‘recycled content’ or ‘waste based’ products that are in many cases slightly twisting the truth… Or at least are controversial definitions of ‘the truth’.

For me, recycled content is simple, it’s waste that's been used to make something new – and importantly, is certified as such. There are multiple standards out there, but the one we use is the RCS (Recycled Claim Standard): https://textileexchange.org/standards/recycled-claim-standard-global-recycled-standard/

For others it seems a little more complex. In fairness, as the saying goes, 'one man’s trash is another man’s treasure', and this really is true in the complex supply chains of the real world. If we take a moment to examine a food supply chain – something that I’m sure most people feel they have some level of knowledge of, I think most of those same people would be surprised by how little they really understand… There is a reason for this, (and a reason I selected food), and that is that we’ve been growing it and eating it for thousands of years, so we’ve quite good at figuring out creative uses for the bits that we don’t eat… But is this recycling?

Take a look at this article by Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/surprising-everyday-products-made-from-cow-parts-2017-10?r=US&IR=T . It’s a brilliant account of all the ways we use the simple cow as a source of resource – and surprisingly only 60% of it is ‘food’. It turns out the other 40% gets used in at least the following list of products:

Lipstick, Drugs, Medical Treatments, Antifreeze, Jet Fuel, Brake Fluid, Toothpaste, Plastic Surgery Fillers, and something I’m quite familiar with: Leather.

(For the record - my employer recycles leather... hence the familiarity... if you imagined anything else - that's on you!)

Life is full of spectrums… But when an animal is used for 60% food, and 40% ‘other stuff’, where is the line on whether the ‘other stuff’ is ‘using waste’? It’s a tough one to draw for me – and I honestly don’t know the answer, but I do know that there are both consumer and B2B products out there that are claiming they are ‘recycled’ because they aren’t part of the 60% food, and instead sit in the other 40%... These claims probably wouldn’t meet the same RCS standard mentioned earlier, but they don’t need to if a clever marketing team want to benefit from them – and there are plenty of clever people out there.

My advice – look for the RCS or GRS standards, and also use those critical thinking skills to watch out for wool (recycled from sheep?) being pulled over your eyes…

?Look out for part 2 of ‘Buzzword Bingo’ next week!