ISO 15270 is the international standard that sets out the options for recovering and recycling plastics waste, and defines the words used to describe them. Its 2008 edition covers where the waste comes from, the routes it can take, and the quality it has to reach to be worth buying.
It is also a standard on its way out. ISO decided in 2023 that it needs revising, and it is being split into five separate parts.
Recovery and recycling sound interchangeable, and in ISO 15270 one clause separates them. Recovery counts burning plastics for energy. Recycling does not.
What ISO 15270 sets out
The standard is short, and most of what it does is settle definitions and map the routes plastics waste can take. Here are the details worth having in front of you.
| Detail | ISO 15270 |
|---|---|
| Full title | Plastics, guidelines for the recovery and recycling of plastics waste |
| Current edition | 2008, the second edition, published in June that year |
| Status | Published and still current, flagged by ISO for revision in 2023 |
| Reviewed | Confirmed in 2013, confirmed again in 2018 |
| Type | Guidance used to write other standards, not something you get certified to |
| Published by | ISO/TC 61/SC 14, the environmental aspects subcommittee for plastics |
Fourteen pages carry all of it. Clause 3 is the vocabulary, clause 4 covers where plastics waste comes from, clause 5 the recovery options, and clause 6 the quality a recovered material has to reach.
Clause 7 then feeds all of that into material and product specifications. Two annexes close it out, one drawing the recovery options as a diagram and one setting them in the wider picture of managing resources rather than managing bins.
The full record sits on ISO's own catalogue page for the standard.
The dates in that table are worth reading together. ISO reviews a published standard roughly every five years, and 15270 was confirmed as still fit in 2013 and again in 2018. In March 2023 the verdict changed to needs revising, which is what set the five-part replacement in motion.
Recovery and recycling are not the same word
This is the distinction the rest of the standard is built on, so it is worth getting straight before anything else.
Recovery is defined as processing plastics waste for its original purpose or for another purpose, including energy recovery.
Recycling is defined in almost identical words, processing plastics waste for its original purpose or another one, excluding energy recovery. One phrase separates them.
Sitting between the two is a third term, material recovery, which covers the routes that keep the material as material. That means mechanical recycling, feedstock recycling and organic recycling, and it stops short of burning anything.
The output has its own word. A recyclate is the plastics material that comes out of recycling.
The standard attaches a point of real commercial weight to it. Once that material has been treated to where it can replace a virgin product in a production process, it stops being waste.
Where plastics waste comes from
Before it names any route, the standard splits plastics waste by origin, and the split matters more than it looks.
Pre-consumer material is diverted during a manufacturing process. Post-consumer material is generated by the end user, either because it has done its job or because it can no longer be used, and it includes material sent back from inside the distribution chain.
The pre-consumer definition carries an exclusion most people miss. Rework, regrind or scrap made in a process and reclaimed inside that same process does not count.
A factory that grinds its own offcuts and feeds them straight back into the same machine is not recovering plastics waste, it is running an efficient line.
Re-use gets a similar ruling. Using a product again in its original form is not a recovery option at all, on the reasoning that nothing was ever discarded.
The four routes plastics waste can take
Once plastics waste has been collected, ISO 15270 recognises four processing routes. The first three are material recovery, the fourth is not.
- Mechanical recycling. Processing plastics waste into a secondary raw material or a product without significantly changing the chemical structure of the material. This is shredding, washing, sorting and re-extruding, and it is what most people picture when they say recycling.
- Feedstock recycling. Converting the waste back to monomer, or producing new raw materials, by changing the chemical structure through cracking, gasification or depolymerization. The standard states plainly that feedstock recycling and chemical recycling are synonyms, and that the route excludes energy recovery and incineration.
- Organic recycling. Controlled microbiological treatment of biodegradable plastics waste, either with oxygen or without it. Composting and anaerobic digestion are the two forms, and the standard treats biological recycling as the same thing under a different name. Packaging-side testing for this route sits in ISO 18606 and its compostability criteria.
- Energy recovery. Producing useful energy through direct and controlled combustion, typically as hot water, steam or electricity. It is recovery but not recycling, and for packaging specifically the requirements live in ISO 18605.
The standard does not rank these four into a league table. It says the best option depends on what the waste actually is, and that life cycle analysis is the way to decide.
It also makes one blunt observation about the hardest case. Where plastics are commingled or composite, energy recovery and some feedstock processes are often the better choice.
Worth noting too is what the standard puts ahead of all four. Its introduction gives top priority to using less material and less energy in the first place, before any question of recovery arises.
Quality is what decides whether a recyclate can be sold
Roughly a third of the document deals with something less glamorous than the routes, which is whether the output is good enough for anyone to use.
Clause 6 puts four things in front of anyone handling recovered plastic, and each one can sink a batch on its own.
| What gets checked | Why it decides the sale |
|---|---|
| Contamination | Unwanted substances or material carried in with the stream |
| Visual and aesthetic aspects | Sounds trivial until a buyer rejects a batch on colour |
| Properties of the recyclate | Whether the material behaves like the one it is replacing |
| Criteria for acceptance | The stated line between a batch that ships and one that does not |
The standard also has a small vocabulary ruling here that is easy to trip over. Impurity is treated as a deprecated synonym of contaminant and should not be used.
All of this feeds clause 7, which is about writing the material standards, test standards and product specifications a plastics buyer actually purchases against. Which brings us to who the document was written for.
Who uses ISO 15270
The scope is unusually candid about its audience, and it is probably not who you expect.
ISO 15270 provides guidance for developing standards and specifications. It is written for the people drafting the rules of plastics recovery rather than for the operator running the line, which is why it reads as vocabulary and structure instead of procedures and thresholds.
That makes it useful downstream in a particular way. Recyclers and converters use it to describe their process in terms a buyer recognises.
Packaging producers use it to check that a supplier claiming recycled content means what the producer means, and anyone writing a specification for recovered plastic uses it as the common dictionary.
How ISO 15270 connects to EU packaging rules
The connection is real, and it is not the one most people assume. It runs through definitions, and the definitions do not match.
The two rulebooks draw the line in different places
Under the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, material recycling is defined in Article 3 as reprocessing waste materials into materials or substances, with biological treatment of waste and the reprocessing of organic material explicitly carved out.
ISO 15270's material recovery does the opposite and counts organic recycling in. The same idea, two boundaries, and the word that moves is the one about composting.
Only post-consumer material counts toward the targets
The second gap is about origin. Article 7 sets minimum recycled content targets for plastic packaging, and it counts only content recovered from post-consumer plastic waste.
The figures start at 30% for contact-sensitive PET packaging, 10% for other contact-sensitive plastics, 30% for single-use plastic beverage bottles and 35% for the rest.
They apply from 1 January 2030 or three years after the relevant implementing act, whichever falls later, and they roughly double by 2040.
Pre-consumer material, which ISO 15270 recognises as a perfectly legitimate source of recovered plastic, does not count toward a single percentage point of that.
Both gaps carry a price
There is money attached in both directions. Article 6 modulates what producers pay into their extended producer responsibility scheme according to recyclability performance grades, and Article 7 allows the same contributions to be modulated on the percentage of recycled content used.
One honest limit belongs here. The regulation never names ISO 15270, and the terms chemical recycling, organic recycling and mass balance appear nowhere in its text.
The standard is upfront about why. Its introduction says it deliberately avoids terminology that would favour one regulatory framework over another, so it is a dictionary and a map rather than a route to compliance.
One standard becoming five
The 2008 edition is being taken apart and rebuilt as a series, roughly one part per recovery route.
| Part | What it covers | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| ISO 15270-1 | General principles | Draft, out for voting |
| ISO 15270-2 | Mechanical recycling | Draft, registered |
| ISO 15270-3 | Physical recycling | Draft, out for ballot |
| ISO 15270-4 | Chemical recycling | Draft, out for voting |
| ISO 15270-5 | Organic and biological recycling | Published, November 2025 |
Part 3 is the one to notice. Physical recycling is not a category the 2008 edition uses anywhere, so the new series is not a reorganisation of the old text. It recognises a route that had no name in 2008.
Part 5 is the only one you can buy and cite today. It covers plastics labelled as industrially compostable, and it is careful about its own edges.
It does not set the test methods for deciding whether something is compostable in the first place, and it excludes home composting outright on the grounds that a gardening practice is not recycling.
Until the other four are published, the 2008 edition remains the current standard, and citing it is correct.
ISO 15270 and the standards around it
Several standards sit close enough to this one to get confused with it, and the differences are easy to state.
The nearest neighbour is ISO 18604, which sets when packaging can be called recyclable. The split between them is organisational.
ISO 18604 is arranged by product and covers packaging of any material. ISO 15270 is arranged by material and covers plastics in any product.
Two others are normative references inside ISO 15270 itself, which means the standard leans on them rather than competing with them.
ISO 17422 governs how environmental aspects get written into plastics standards generally, and ISO 14021 governs the environmental claims a company makes about the recycled content it has achieved.
Then there is the practical companion. ISO/TR 17098 catalogues the substances that stop packaging being recycled, which is the applied version of ISO 15270's contamination clause.
On the European side, EN 15343 covers traceability and recycled content for recycled plastics, and it appears in ISO 15270's own bibliography.
Frequently asked questions about ISO 15270
Below are the seven questions producers ask most often about ISO 15270.
What is ISO 15270?
ISO 15270 is the international standard, in its 2008 edition, that sets out the options for recovering and recycling plastics waste and defines the terms used for them. It covers mechanical, feedstock and organic recycling plus energy recovery.
Is ISO 15270 a certification?
No. It is guidance written to help other standards and specifications get drafted, so you conform to it and cite it rather than getting audited against it. None of the plastics recovery standards in this family are certifications.
What edition of ISO 15270 is current?
The 2008 edition, which is the second. ISO confirmed it in 2013 and again in 2018, then flagged it for revision in March 2023, but it remains the published and citable version until the replacement parts appear.
What is the difference between recovery and recycling in ISO 15270?
Recovery includes energy recovery, meaning burning plastics under control to produce useful heat or power. Recycling excludes it. Both cover processing the waste for its original purpose or another one, so that single exclusion is the whole difference.
Does ISO 15270 count pre-consumer plastic as recycled content?
It recognises pre-consumer material as a legitimate source of plastics waste, with one carve-out for scrap reclaimed inside the same process. EU packaging rules are stricter, counting only post-consumer material toward their recycled content targets.
Is chemical recycling covered by ISO 15270?
Yes, under the name feedstock recycling, which the standard states is a synonym for chemical recycling. It covers cracking, gasification and depolymerization, and it deliberately excludes energy recovery and incineration.
Will ISO 15270 be replaced?
Yes, by a five-part series. Part 5 on organic and biological recycling was published in November 2025 and the other four parts are at draft stage, so the 2008 edition stays current in the meantime.
