USDA Announces First Products with BioPreferred Sustainable Packaging Label

USDA has announced that 60 products are now qualified to use the USDA BioPreferred product label, which indicates that a product’s packaging has been made entirely or mostly of biobased materials.

USDA’s BioPreferred program for sustainable packaging enables consumers to better distinguish packaging made with sustainable agriculture byproducts from fossil-fuel intensive packaging.

“Because many biobased packages look the same as petroleum-based products, the biobased product label lets everyone know they can trust manufacturer’s biobased claims as they’ve been verified through a reliable, rigorous third-party certification process,” said James Sanfilippo, president and CEO of Clear Lam Packaging Inc. (Elk Grove Village, IL), one of the first companies to receive the label.

Clear Lam Packaging was awarded a biobased label for its renewable thermoformed produce packaging, a product derived from over 93% plant-based bioplastics and already used in Marketside brand Organic Lettuce containers at Walmart stores.

Other companies to receive the first BioPreferred labels include Nutek Green, a division of Hoover Inc. (Glenwillow, OH); Seventh Generation (Burlington, VT); Betco Corp. (Toledo, OH); DuPont Corp. (Wilmington, DE); ElastiKote (Akron, OH); Green Earth Technologies (Celebration, FL); National Industries for the Blind Agencies (Lighthouse for the Blind, St. Louis, MO and Travis Association for the Blind, Austin, TX); NatureWorks LLC (Minnetonka, MN); Rochester Midland Corp. (Rochester, NY); and Bio-Lub Canada (Trois-Rivieres, QC).

Companies are independently certified to meet USDA's BioPreferred program standards for biobased content.