Closed loop means the same product again. Anything else should say what it is.

A recycled claim should carry one plain word: post-consumer, post-industrial or mass balance. Only the first went to a home or a store and came back.

A warehouse hands over one kind of film, clean and baled. A household hands over a bread bag with crumbs and a receipt inside. A report prepared for the Closed Loop Foundation put figures on the difference: about 21% of commercial polyethylene film was recycled, about 4% of residential film, and only about 3% of the film placed in curbside programs could be marketed.

The same report says much of the recycled commercial film goes into trash bags and thicker commercial film. The plant floor shows why. Recycled pellets come out grey or beige, so a clear bag is out of reach and black hides the rest. They also bring gels, small hard dots of unmelted or foreign plastic. The film thins next to a gel, and a thin spot becomes a hole. A garbage bag is the product that tolerates a little grey, a little odour and a few gels.

That is why we keep “closed loop” for its strict sense: a bread bag becomes a bread bag again. For household film, what we see is one grade down, bread bag to garbage bag. It is a one-way street with one extra stop. That still beats the landfill, and it deserves its real name.

Two other things borrow the word “recycled.” The first is factory scrap. Trim and start-up film routinely go back into the same process in a film plant, and the US Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides treat a recycled content claim on that scrap as deceptive. The second is mass balance, where a recycled share is assigned to a product on paper. In April 2023, the Association of Plastic Recyclers told the FTC that on-pack claims based on mass balance are deceptive, citing “little to no physical traceability.”

Some laws say which kind. Washington State’s 2021 law requires post-consumer content in trash bags: 10% from 2023, 15% from 2025, 20% from 2027. Ottawa proposed recycled content rules in 2023, garbage bags included. Quebec gave itself the power in 2025 to set a minimum by regulation. As of October 2026, we had found no final rule in Ottawa and no minimum set in Quebec. A mandate is a guaranteed buyer. It works only if collection and washing are paid for too. A percentage alone leaves every plant competing for the same clean material.

What this changes for you. If you buy bags or film with a recycled claim, ask which of the three words applies, and ask for the answer in writing. If the word is post-consumer and the product is a garbage bag, a dark colour is normal. It is what the material looks like.