I just learned of this change by the FDA, where food containers will be allowed to be made from post-consumer recycling. As this message says, this could be big news and might help revitalize the sluggish recycling market:

The Latest Buzz on Recycling: Starbucks To Make Cups From Recycled Materials It's the hottest news to pour into the recycling community in years, and it's giving sustainability efforts a high-octane jolt. In November, the Starbucks Coffee Company announced that the Food and Drug Administration had given the company and one of its suppliers permission to make the first coffee cup from post-consumer recycled fibers. It's an historic first and a wake-up call that may mean more than saving trees.

The announcement that Starbucks soon will be providing consumers with
coffee cups made from post-consumer recycled materials is the biggest bang to hit the recycling world in years. Why get so excited about the cup your joe comes in? One reason is the sheer size of the Starbucks espresso empire. With over 8,000 stores around the world, Starbucks is one of the largest caffeination corporations in the world. While the company's corporate responsibility report doesn't say how many trees it requires each year for the paper used in its operations, it does say that over half of all the paper it consumes is used for its hot beverage cups. Replacing even a small percentage of all that paper with post-consumer recycled fibers will save a lot of trees.

Even more importantly, prior to November's historic announcement, the FDA had never allowed any company anywhere to manufacture any food container of any kind from post-consumer recycled paper. If a product was destined to touch food, it had to come from virgin paper.

For years, recycling advocates have decried this policy as shortsighted and utterly unnecessary. Noting that one of the largest components of the modern waste stream is food containers, they've urged the federal government to allow the paper that consumers are recycling in their homes to be made into food containers. Until now, citing what many feel were misplaced safety and hygiene concerns, the FDA, which has jurisdiction over such matters, has refused to budge. As a result, the market for the paper consumers are recycling, i.e. post-consumer recycled paper, hasn't been nearly as strong as it could be. Without high-volume demand destinations like food and beverage container markets to support our recycling efforts, less demand is created for recycled paper, it's worth less, and not all the paper we're dutifully recycling can find a place to be reused. When that happens, our waste paper ends up in landfills despite
our best efforts to reuse it. On the other hand, if our used paper could be made into new food containers, we'd make giant leaps and bounds toward more fully closing the recycling loop.

Starbucks says it hopes to convert all its hot beverage cups to 10% post-consumer recycled content by the end of 2005. In doing so the company hopes to save five million pounds of tree fiber annually. That won't save the world, but it is certainly an important start. And we'll drink to that!