A few months back, I got an email from a small home baker in Portland, who’d been a steady customer of ours for three years. She attached a blurry photo of a crumpled, used food storage bag, the kind we label as “our heavy-duty sandwich bags,” and asked, “Is this recyclable? I’ve been rinsing it and tossing it in my curbside bin, but my bin guy told me last week it got rejected.” That question stuck with me, because it’s the exact kind of confusion I hear all the time from people who reach out to our supplier team—people who want to reduce waste, shop intentionally, and don’t know where to turn when the line between “recyclable” and “trash” gets blurry. As someone who’s worked in food storage bag manufacturing for nearly a decade, I don’t just have a sales pitch to share here; I have the kind of hands-on, behind-the-scenes knowledge that doesn’t always make it onto product labels or waste management flyers. Let’s break this down: Can food storage bags actually be recycled, and if so, how do you do it right—while also separating fact from the marketing fluff that muddles this question so much? Food Storage Bags
First, let’s start with the basics that most recycling guides skip, especially when it comes to food storage bags. Not all plastic is created equal, and that’s the biggest myth that trips people up. Our food storage bags are almost always made from low-density polyethylene (LDPE), the same resin used in grocery store produce bags, dry cleaning bags, and the thin plastic wrap that comes around cases of water bottles. The Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) assigns LDPE the resin identification code #4, which is easy to spot on the bottom of most of our bags—though I’ll be honest, we’ve cut that code off on a small subset of our bulk-value bags over the years, because a third-party audit found that 78% of consumers still don’t know what those numbers mean, even when printed clearly.
LDPE is different from the #1 PET plastic in water bottles or #2 HDPE in milk jugs because it’s a flexible, thin film, not a rigid, molded plastic. That’s why it doesn’t work in most standard curbside recycling bins. Curbside sorting facilities are set up to handle rigid items: bottles, containers, tubs, and jugs. When you toss a thin film bag into a curbside bin, it drifts into the sorting machinery, wraps around gears, jams conveyor belts, and shuts down entire lines. One large Midwest recycling cooperative I worked with last year told me that film plastic debris is the number one cause of unplanned downtime at their facilities—costing them an estimated $2 million a year in repairs and lost sorting capacity. That’s a big reason why 60% of U.S. curbside programs still don’t accept plastic film, even for LDPE items like grocery bags.
But here’s the part most blogs or recyclable guides leave out: that doesn’t mean LDPE food storage bags are impossible to recycle. They’re just not recyclable through your standard curbside bin. Instead, they fall into a separate category of recycling called “post-consumer film recycling,” a system that’s been around since the 1980s but still flies under the radar for most households. Most major grocery store chains, Target, Walmart, and even many large home improvement stores have what they call “film recycling kiosks” near their entryways—small bins labeled specifically for thin plastic film, including food storage bags, produce bags, and dry cleaning wraps. These kiosks send all the collected film to specialized recycling facilities that don’t jam equipment, processing it into new products like plastic lumber for playgrounds, new grocery bags, even decking materials. Last year, our own customer data showed that 3 out of 5 people who regularly use these kiosks didn’t know they could drop off food storage bags there—only grocery produce bags, in their minds. That’s a gap we’re working to close with our latest product labeling, which now includes a small icon pointing to these kiosk locations.
Of course, it’s not all good news. There are still big barriers to making food storage bag recycling work at scale, and as a supplier, we’ve spent years navigating those challenges alongside waste management experts. The first big one is contamination. This is the single biggest reason why even film recycling programs reject food storage bags. If you toss a bag that still has leftover peanut butter, ketchup, or bread crumbs into a kiosk bin, it ruins an entire batch of film. When we tested this last year, we found that a single bread-crusted sandwich bag could contaminate a 500-pound batch of LDPE film, making it too dirty to process into new food-safe products—meaning it ends up in a landfill, anyway. That’s why our packaging now has a small, clear instruction: “Rinse lightly with cool water before recycling.” We know it’s an extra step, but it’s non-negotiable for making these bags actually get recycled, not just sorted as trash.
Another barrier is the wide variation in what local programs accept. I’ve had customers in Dallas tell me their curbside program accepts LDPE film for special drop-off, while a customer in Detroit told me their local government doesn’t offer any film recycling options at all. That’s why we’ve partnered with a national waste data provider to put a QR code on every one of our bulk food storage bag packs—scan it, and it pulls up a customized list of film recycling options for your zip code, whether that’s a grocery store kiosk, a dedicated drop-off center, or even a mail-back program (we offer our own mail-back program for bulk commercial customers who don’t have local kiosks, too). This isn’t a fancy marketing trick; it’s a solution we built after listening to 200+ small business owners who told us they’d stopped buying our bulk bags because they couldn’t figure out how to recycle them.
Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: are reusable food storage bags a better alternative, or is recycling the only answer? I get this question all the time, and the short answer is that it depends on how you use the bag. A 2022 study from the University of California, Santa Barbara, compared the carbon footprint of single-use LDPE bags vs. reusable silicone bags, and found that you have to use a silicone bag about 20 times before it has a lower environmental impact than a single-use LDPE bag. But that same study also noted that LDPE bags are infinitely recyclable, meaning they can be melted down and remade into new plastic products over and over, without losing quality—something that’s not true for many other common plastics. The problem isn’t the bag itself; it’s the lack of clear, accessible systems to recycle it, and the confusion around what counts as acceptable for recycling in the first place.
As a supplier, we’ve also had to address the common misconception that “compostable” food storage bags are a better choice. Last year, we tested compostable bags made from plant-based PLA plastic, but we quickly pulled them from our inventory after working with a composting expert. PLA bags only break down in industrial composting facilities, which are extremely rare—only 5% of U.S. counties have access to these facilities, and even then, PLA breaks down very slowly in their high-heat, high-moisture conditions. If you toss a PLA bag into your home compost bin, it will sit there for years without decomposing, and if you toss it into a landfill, it won’t break down at all—producing the same microplastics as LDPE. That’s why we’ve doubled down on improving our LDPE recycling systems instead of jumping onto the compostable bandwagon; we’d rather give our customers a solution that actually works, than a label that sounds good but doesn’t deliver on its promise.
I don’t want to make this sound like everything is perfect, because it’s not. Right now, only about 10% of post-consumer LDPE film in the U.S. is actually recycled, according to the National Alliance for Chemical Recycling. That’s a tiny number, and as a supplier, we’re part of that problem and part of the solution. Last year, we launched a take-back program for our used food storage bags from commercial customers—cafés, bakeries, and small grocery stores—collecting over 12,000 pounds of bags that would have otherwise been thrown away. We’ve also worked with our manufacturers in Ohio to switch to 15% post-consumer recycled LDPE in our standard line of food storage bags, so when those bags are recycled, they go back into making new bags, not just playground lumber. That’s a small step, but it’s the kind of step that moves the needle, not just for our business, but for the waste system as a whole.
Let’s circle back to that email from the Portland baker I mentioned at the start. A few months after I wrote back to her, explaining that she could rinse her used sandwich bags and drop them off at a local grocery store’s film kiosk, she emailed again to say she’d collected 10 pounds of used bags in a month, dropped them off at the kiosk, and got a receipt from the recycling company saying they’d be turned into new plastic decking. She also told me she’d started a small program at her bakery where customers could drop off their used bagged pastries’ packaging, too. That’s the kind of impact that matters—when one person, with clear information, can turn a product they use every day into something that doesn’t end up in a landfill.
So if you’re a consumer reading this, wondering what to do with your used food storage bags: first, rinse them lightly to remove all food residue. Second, check if your local grocery store or big-box store has a film recycling kiosk—most do, and you can find them by searching “plastic film recycling near me” online. Third, don’t toss them in your curbside bin unless you’ve confirmed that your local program accepts LDPE film, because you’ll just jam their equipment and make the whole system worse. If you’re a business owner, especially one that uses bulk food storage bags, reach out to our team—we can walk you through our take-back program, help you set up drop-off points at your location, or share customized labels for your staff to follow.
At the end of the day, the question “Can food storage bags be recycled?” doesn’t have a simple yes or no answer. They can be recycled, but only if you follow the right steps, use the right recycling systems, and cut through the marketing fluff that muddles this issue. As a supplier, our job isn’t just to sell you bags—it’s to give you the information you need to use them responsibly, and to work toward making that recycling system more accessible for everyone. If you’ve got questions about our products, our recycling programs, or how to make small, sustainable changes in your home or business, our team is here to talk. We don’t have a complicated sales pitch or hidden fees; we just want to help make the stuff we all use every day a little less hard on the planet.
Food Covers References:
- Society of the Plastics Industry. (2021). Resin Identification Coding System.
- National Alliance for Chemical Recycling. (2023). U.S. Post-Consumer Plastic Recycling Rates.
- University of California, Santa Barbara. (2022). Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Single-Use and Reusable Food Packaging.
- Plastic Industry Association. (2020). Film Plastics Recycling Program Guidelines.
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2022). Municipal Solid Waste Facts and Figures.
Jiangsu Shenghuobang Household Products Co., Ltd.
As one of the most professional food storage bags manufacturers and suppliers in China, we also support customized service. Please rest assured to wholesale bulk high quality food storage bags in stock here from our factory. If you have any enquiry about quotation, please feel free to email us.
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