Why Are My Cup Sleeves Blue?

If you use our GreenStripe® cold cups, you may have noticed a change in the way your products are showing up. It would be hard not to notice actually, as the plastic sleeves that hold the cups are now tinted blue!

After about a decade of work, we’re excited to announce that we’ve finally managed to get post-consumer recycled content (PCR) into the sleeves that hold the cups. In order to call attention to this exciting development, and raise awareness around the importance of using post-consumer content in plastics of all kinds, we’ve decided to tint the sleeves blue.

We couldn’t have done it without a lot of help from our colleagues at WNA and Shields – two sister brands of ours under the Novolex corporate umbrella – so please join us in thanking them for all of their hard work.

The new, blue sleeves contain 25% post-consumer recycled content, which means that we are using 25% less virgin plastic in each one. That can really add up when you consider how many sleeves we use each year. The viability of recycling and composting depends, in large part, on healthy end-market demand for the materials we hope to recycle and compost. Including post-consumer recycled content in more of the things we make is one way to help support that end-market demand.

Unfortunately, adding PCR content to our sleeves does not change their recyclability for the better, and film like this remains difficult to recycle today outside of store drop-off programs and other special collection programs. Still, we think this is a big step in the right direction and hope you do too!