Post-consumer, Pre-consumer and Recycled Content

I am constantly noticing new terms on packaging. One that caught my eye recently was post-consumer content. After a little bit of research I learned there were two similar labeling phrases, and the three are often compared and confused with each other.

##Pre-consumer Content##

Pre-consumer products are made from materials that would otherwise have been discarded. Examples of pre-consumer content would be trimmings from packaging, or items rejected by quality control during the manufacturing process.

There are more than 4,500 recycled-content products available – a number that continues to increase. Many of the products you buy contain recycled-content.

##Post-consumer Content##

Post-consumer content is a material that has served its intended purpose and has been discarded. The discarded material, usually what you toss in your recycling bin, is then re-purposed and used as post-consumer content.

##Recycled Content##

Recycled content might be made of any combination of post-consumer content and recycled content. Recycled content is not necessarily or primarily produced from a typical local recycling program as the name might lead you to believe.

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No kind of recycling is any better than the other. Obviously we strive to reuse content again and again as many times as possible, so seeing more post-consumer content coming into the market will be exciting for all of us.