Recycled Content Challenges: Maintaining Quality and Consistency

In today’s plastics industry, sustainability isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a business requirement. As consumer brands and OEMs push for higher percentages of recycled content in their products, processors are tasked with the difficult balancing act of meeting sustainability targets while maintaining part quality and production consistency.

The challenge? Recycled content brings variability, and variability is the enemy of repeatable molding.

Material Variability

Unlike virgin resins, which are engineered for tight specifications, recycled plastics often vary in:

• Molecular weight distribution – impacting flow and mechanical properties.
• Color and clarity – leading to inconsistent aesthetics.
• Contamination – metals, paper, or other resins that can degrade performance.

This inconsistency makes it difficult to predict how the resin will behave in the press, leading to part defects and higher scrap rates.

Processing Challenges

Processors often find themselves making more frequent adjustments when running recycled content.

• Drying: Regrind or recycled resins often absorb more moisture, requiring tighter control.
• Melt stability: Thermal history from previous processing can increase sensitivity to shear and heat.
• Cycle time impacts: Variability in shrinkage or cooling behavior can disrupt established cycle times.

Without proper monitoring, these variables add up to inefficiencies that erode cost savings and sustainability gains.

From Challenges to Solutions

Material variability and processing hurdles may feel like unavoidable costs of using recycled content—but they don’t have to be. The good news is that processors aren’t left to tackle these issues alone. Equipment manufacturers, tooling experts, and training providers have all developed targeted solutions to stabilize recycled materials in production. By combining smarter machine packages, advanced screw designs, optimized cooling systems, and scientific molding practices, processors can transform recycled content from a source of frustration into a pathway to both sustainability and profitability.

ARBURG’s Recyclate Package: Designed for the Realities of Recycled Materials

Recognizing these challenges, ARBURG has developed a dedicated recyclate package for its ALLROUNDER injection molding machines. This package includes wear-resistant plasticizing components, specially designed screws, and process control features that help stabilize production when running post-consumer or post-industrial recycled materials. By combining robust hardware with intelligent software functions, the recyclate package ensures more consistent melt preparation, improved reproducibility, and higher part quality—even when resin inputs are less predictable.

Reiloy Screws: Engineered for Melt Consistency

When it comes to recycled content, melt quality is everything. Reiloy’s custom-engineered screws, including the Eagle mixing screw, are designed to maximize melt homogeneity, stabilize thermal profiles, and minimize shear-related degradation. This is particularly critical when processing recycled resins, which may include contaminants or materials with uneven thermal histories. By improving mixing and recovery efficiency, Reiloy screws help processors reduce scrap, shorten cycle times, and maintain part consistency—even with challenging material streams.

Smartflow: Cooling Tools That Protect Quality

Recycled materials often bring different shrinkage and warpage behavior, making cooling control more important than ever. Smartflow’s water-cooling optimization tools—including flow meters, manifolds, and online calculators—allow processors to balance flow, identify hot spots, and dial in cooling times with scientific precision. This helps reduce warping, dimensional instability, and cycle-to-cycle variability, ensuring recycled content parts meet the same quality standards as virgin resin parts.

Kruse Analysis and Training: Building a Scientific Foundation

Variability requires knowledge and discipline to manage. Kruse Analysis and Kruse Training give processors the tools to establish robust processes and understand cause-and-effect relationships in molding. Through scientific molding techniques such as cavity pressure monitoring, gate freeze studies, and systematic troubleshooting, processors gain the confidence to run recycled content without chasing their process or overcompensating with guesswork.

Looking Ahead: Blending Sustainability with Performance

The future of recycled content in plastics processing depends on two parallel tracks:

• Better recycling technology – improving feedstock consistency through advanced sorting, chemical recycling, and purification.
• Smarter processing technology – leveraging AI, sensors, and adaptive control systems to stabilize processes even with variable inputs.

For processors, the key will be to adopt equipment, practices, and materials that close the gap between sustainability goals and production realities.

Final Takeaway

Recycled content is here to stay, but achieving consistency and quality requires more than good intentions. By combining the available tools and education, processors can minimize variability and deliver sustainable products that meet performance expectations—without sacrificing profitability.