PIR stands for post-industrial recycled, also called pre-consumer recycled. It is plastic recovered from manufacturing scrap, such as film edge trims, start-up waste, sprues and rejected parts, that never reached a consumer.
PIR is clean, of known composition and easy to recycle, so it has always had a ready market. For the same reason, it does little to solve the waste problem: the material was never at risk of being dumped. Most regulations and certification schemes therefore treat it differently from PCR. Scrap that is simply reground and fed back into the same process is usually not counted as recycled content at all. When a supplier offers recycled material, asking whether it is PCR or PIR, and for the chain-of-custody evidence, is the first step.
