National Standards for Recycled Materials from Home Appliances: The Standards Are Here, but Where Are the Materials?

On May 1, 2026, the national standard Specifications for the Use of Recycled Materials in Household Appliance Products (GB/T 46730—2025) officially came into effect.

This standard doesn’t mess around—it directly introduces the dual indicators of “post-consumer recycled material usage rate” and “post-consumer recycled plastic usage rate,” and classifies household appliance products intoAA+A++three grades. Meanwhile, the Action Plan for Promoting the Application of Recycled Materials is also being advanced, with the goal of exceeding 19.5 million tonnes in annual recycled plastic production by 2030. Major modified plastics manufacturers such as Kingfa and Dawn are already taking the lead in developing relevant standards for recycled materials used in electronic and electrical products.

Two months have passed since the national standard took effect, and everyone in the industrial chain is facing the same issue:Are you keeping up?

The standard has been established, but the suppliers have not been secured yet.

The standard is the current standard, and there are hard indicators for the proportion of recycled materials used. Whether a product can be labeled A, A+, or A++ directly affects its appearance. However, those in the home appliance industry are well aware of three things:

First, compliance is a hard constraint.This is neither a "recommendation" nor an "encouragement"; it is a quantifiable, verifiable national standard that cannot be avoided.

Second, quality must not decline.Even when using recycled materials, refrigerator door panels must not yellow, air conditioner housings must not have black spots, and food-contact parts must not have any odor. Consumers will not accept a new appliance that looks like a secondhand one just because it is eco-friendly.

Third, stable supply is the biggest pitfall.The head of procurement at a leading home appliance company put it bluntly: "The national standard has been implemented, but we are still looking for suppliers of recycled materials that are stable, compliant, and high-quality."

🔧 Recycled plastics for home appliances are never as simple as "replacing new materials with old materials."

Take refrigerators, for example—most mainstream plastic parts are food-contact grade, so it is almost impossible for post-consumer recycled (PCR) materials to directly replace them in terms of performance. Exterior trim parts can use PCR, but they account for only a small share by weight, and they still have to meet requirements for batch-to-batch consistency and aging resistance.

There are companies in the industry trying to do this."Core-shell structure"New materials for the skin layer and PCR modified materials for the core layer, taking into account both appearance and recycled content. However, this requires suppliers to collaborate with you on technical challenges; it cannot be accomplished by just one company.

The bigger issue is trust. Recycled plastics have long been labeled as “downcycled”: full of black specks, strong odors, and compromised performance.

But things are changing.

Haier Smart Home · Qingdao Laixi Recycle Interconnected Factory

Connecting the entire chain of "recycling - dismantling - regeneration - reuse," waste home appliances go through dozens of processes, producing low-odor, black-dot-free recycled materials such as PP, ABS, HIPS, PS, and GPPS.Purity up to 99.9%。

The following data is sourced from Haier Smart Home.

The materials have been applied in fields such as automotive, home, daily chemicals, office automation, and home appliances, and have been showcased at the K Show in Germany, receiving recognition from several international chemical giants.

How far is it from "usable" to "easy to use"? That is the gap the entire industry chain needs to fill.

The general materials are running low, and home appliances require "custom solutions."

With the arrival of the national standard, home appliance manufacturers have changed their stance on recycled materials: they used to ask, “Do you have any?” Now they ask, “Is it any good?”

Appearance parts must have consistent color with no black spots. Structural parts must have stable mechanical properties. As for food-contact parts, needless to say, every safety standard must be fully met.

This is pushing recycled materials companies to shift from “selling generic materials” to “delivering customized solutions”—from efficient sorting and purification to address black spots and odors, to molecular chain repair and toughening modification to restore performance, and further to chemical recycling for mixed waste plastics. Technological routes are becoming increasingly diversified, but the core point is simple: whoever can find the optimal balance among quality, consistency, and cost will earn the ticket to entry.

The biggest obstacle: unable to find each other.

The reality is quite twisted.

On one side, home appliance companies are being chased by national standards, urgently needing stable and high-performance recycled materials. On the other side, recycled material companies have products with good performance but do not know what home appliance manufacturers want or how to get into their supplier lists.

A home appliance materials manager once said: “We know there are good recycled materials on the market, but we don’t know who is making them, what level they are at, or whether they can supply them stably.”

The founder of another modified-materials company is also troubled: “Our products are no worse than virgin materials, but we don’t know how to convince home appliance manufacturers to trust us, or how to get through their supplier audits.”

This is not a capability issue; it is a connection issue.