The FDA letter of no objection: how recycled PET earns food contact

A voluntary process that became the industry standard

The FDA letter of no objection, LNO, grew out of a program the agency started in 1990, when recycled plastic first began knocking on the door of food packaging. A recycler voluntarily submits a detailed description of its recycling process, and the FDA's food-contact scientists evaluate whether that process reliably removes potential contaminants from post-consumer material. If the agency is satisfied, it issues a letter stating that it has no objection to the use of the resulting recycled polymer in food-contact articles, subject to whatever conditions the letter spells out. Roughly 300 such letters have been issued since the program began, and new batches continue to arrive, including a notable group in April 2025.

Two features of the design matter enormously in practice. First, the review is per process, not per company and not per material. An LNO describes a specific recycling process, operating within specified parameters, at a specified degree of source control. Change the process fundamentally and the letter no longer describes what you are doing. Second, participation is voluntary, but the market has made it mandatory in effect: brand owners and converters in food and beverage will not qualify a recycled resin without it, and state content mandates that apply to beverage bottles are, in practice, mandates for LNO-backed material.

What the FDA actually tests for

The scientific core of the review is contamination. Post-consumer bottles have lived in the world: they may have held motor oil, pesticides, or solvents in a previous life as somebody's storage container. The FDA's question is whether the recycling process removes such contaminants down to a level of negligible risk.

The agency's benchmark is exacting. A process must demonstrate that contaminant concentrations in the food itself would stay at or below 0.5 parts per billion, the agency's threshold of regulatory concern, a level corresponding to a dietary intake of no more than 1.5 micrograms per person per day. The classic demonstration is surrogate contaminant testing: virgin polymer is deliberately soaked in a cocktail of representative contaminants, aggressive solvents, heavy metals, volatile organics, then run through the applicant's recycling process, and the output is measured for what survived.

PET holds a privileged position in this framework. The FDA has concluded that tertiary recycling processes for PET, those that break the polymer down chemically and repolymerize it, remove contaminants so thoroughly that surrogate testing data is not required for such submissions. For the mechanical processes that dominate actual supply, the surrogate challenge remains the proving ground, which is why well-controlled source streams, deposit-return bottles above all, are so prized: the cleaner the input, the stronger the demonstration.

What an LNO is not

The most common misreading in procurement documents is the word approval. An LNO is legally not an approval, a clearance, or a certification. It is the agency's written statement that, based on the data submitted, it currently has no questions about the process's ability to produce recycled polymer suitable for the intended food-contact use. The legal responsibility for compliance stays with the companies producing and using the material. That distinction is not pedantry: it shapes how quality systems must operate. The letter covers a process; the daily discipline of running that process within its envelope, controlling input streams, and testing output is what actually keeps the material food-safe, shipment after shipment.

This is also why serious buyers audit suppliers rather than merely collecting paperwork. A letter from 2014 or 2019 is evidence of process capability. Consistent certificates of analysis, source-stream documentation, and plant discipline are evidence of process performance.

Why the LNO defines the market's structure

Because the letter attaches to a process, food-grade capability cannot be bought on the spot market or improvised in a tight quarter. It has to be built, demonstrated, and maintained. That single fact explains most of the structure of the North American rPET market:

• Two markets, one polymer. Bottle-grade flake destined for food contact and general-purpose rPET for fiber or strapping can come from the same bale, but they are priced and contracted like different materials, because one carries a regulatory demonstration and the other does not.
• Mandates concentrate demand on LNO-backed supply. California's 25% requirement for beverage containers, analyzed in our review of SB 54 and AB 793, is effectively a demand mandate for food-contact-capable material, as are the EU bottle targets we cover in our EU analysis.
• Supply responds slowly. New entrants face a real gauntlet: process engineering, source-stream control, challenge testing, submission, review. The April 2025 batch of letters shows the pipeline works, but it works in years, not quarters.

What a submission actually contains

Understanding what goes into an LNO file explains why the letters carry the weight they do. A complete submission describes the source of the post-consumer material and the controls that keep non-food-grade inputs out, because the FDA's evaluation assumes a defined input stream, not whatever arrives at the dock. It documents the process itself, washing, sorting, decontamination steps, temperatures, residence times, the operating envelope within which the demonstration holds. It specifies the intended conditions of use for the output, since a resin cleared for room-temperature beverage contact is not thereby cleared for hot-fill or oven use. And it carries the analytical evidence, surrogate-challenge results for mechanical processes, that ties the whole file together.

Each element becomes a live obligation after the letter issues. Source control is the one buyers should scrutinize hardest, because it is the one that degrades most easily in practice: a reclaimer under volume pressure faces a standing temptation to widen the input funnel, and every widening quietly stretches the distance between the process the FDA reviewed and the process actually running. The strongest suppliers treat their letter's assumptions as specifications, audited internally with the same rigor as the output specs, and can show a buyer the paper trail proving it.

Reading a supplier's letter like a buyer

For procurement and quality teams qualifying recycled resin, a short discipline extracts most of the value. Ask for the letter itself, not a summary, and read the conditions: which polymer, which process, which uses. Confirm the letter's holder is the entity actually running the process on your material, since letters do not transfer with resin through trading hands. Map the letter's input assumptions against the supplier's real source streams, deposit bottles, curbside bales, thermoform regrind, and ask how each is verified. Then connect the letter to the lot: certificates of analysis, per-shipment, that demonstrate the output is living inside the cleared envelope.

None of this is adversarial. A supplier who has operated under an LNO for years will answer these questions from files, quickly, and the speed of the answer is itself diagnostic information. The pathway has been the industry's quality backbone for three decades precisely because serious operators internalized it; the buyer's job is simply to distinguish the operators from the paperwork holders before mandates make the distinction expensive.

The international mirror

The United States is not alone in regulating recycled food-contact plastic at the process level. The European Union runs an authorization regime for recycling processes under its own food-contact regulation, and the parallel is instructive: on both continents, regulators concluded that the way to make recycled content safe at scale is to certify the machine, not the molecule. For multinational buyers this creates a two-clearance world, and material that satisfies both regimes trades at the top of the market. It is also why global mandate stacking, Europe's 30% by 2030 and California's 50% by 2030, ultimately cashes out as competition for the output of a finite set of cleared processes.

The read

A final practical marker: the pace of new letters is itself market intelligence. Batches like April 2025's tell you where new food-grade capacity is coming from, which processes and which feedstocks the agency is seeing, and roughly when that capacity will reach the market. Buyers who track the FDA's public submissions database annually hold a two-year preview of the supply side that most of their competitors never open.

The LNO system is thirty-six years old and still doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping recycled material safe enough to sit against food while giving legitimate processes a path to market. What has changed is the stakes. When recycled content was a marketing choice, the letter was a differentiator. Now that content is written into law on two continents, the letter is a license to participate in the fastest-growing segment of the polymer economy. The industry's constraint is no longer whether recycled PET can be food-safe. It is how much LNO-backed material the collection system can feed, which is why the collection stories we track, from deposit systems to national recycling rates, are ultimately food-safety stories too.