To facilitate understanding of the recycled content, it is important to define the terms “pre-consumer” and “post-consumer”, which represent the verified content, and the term “recovery”, which represents the declared content.
- Pre-consumer: This refers to materials diverted from the waste stream during the manufacturing process. It excludes the reuse of materials, such as those resulting from reprocessing and regrinding or residues generated during a process; materials that can be recovered in the same process that generated them.
- Post-consumer: This refers to materials generated by households or commercial, industrial or institutional facilities in their role as an end user of the product, and which can no longer be used for the application for which they were designed. This includes material returns from the distribution chain.
- Recovery: This is the action of reintroducing or recovering products or residual materials generated by the products or the same manufacturing process to obtain new materials and avoid their elimination (i.e. landfill or incineration).
Depending on the requirements of ISO 14020/21 and ISO 7000-1135 standards, the method for calculating the recycled content and the certification sheet cannot include the recovery portion. Since nonconforming products and residues from the SOPRA-XPS production line originate from the same process, it is impossible to account for the portion of materials recovered (reintroduced) during product manufacture.
For the sake of transparency, SOPREMA presents the portion of verified recycled content (according to ISO standards) separately, compared to the declared content which includes the portion of recovered materials (reintroduced) during product manufacturing. Following this same logic, the content including recovery is therefore verified separately but is not presented in the Recycled Content Certification.