Polystyrene Recycling Alliance Releases Comprehensive Report on the Safety of Polystyrene Packaging

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Polystyrene Recycling Alliance (PSRA), a leading North American coalition advancing innovative polystyrene recycling solutions, released a comprehensive report documenting the independent scientific and regulatory record on polystyrene safety for polystyrene packaging.

The report, Polystyrene: The Safety Record, assembles decades of evidence from the world's leading health and food safety authorities in a single, accessible document. It addresses the persistent public confusion between styrene, the raw liquid ingredient used to manufacture polystyrene, and polystyrene itself, the solid, chemically stable material that results from it. These are two distinct substances with fundamentally different safety profiles, and the distinction between them is at the center of the polystyrene safety debate.

"The evidence on polystyrene safety is clear, consistent, and decades deep," said Justin Riney, chair of the Polystyrene Recycling Alliance. "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has determined polystyrene is suitable for food contact for more than 50 years. The European Food Safety Authority completed its most comprehensive review in decades in June 2025 and found no evidence of harm at real-world exposure levels. Independent peer-reviewed research spanning more than 30 years is consistent with those findings.”

Among the report's key findings:

• The FDA's acceptable daily intake for styrene is 90 milligrams per person per day. Actual exposure from polystyrene packaging is estimated at 0.007 milligrams.
• Styrene is the liquid ingredient used to make polystyrene. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, a naturally occurring compound found in many everyday foods — strawberries, cinnamon, coffee, peanuts, and beef among them. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has confirmed that the styrene people consume through their diet from natural food sources is comparable to what they might encounter from polystyrene packaging. Decades of research across the general population have found no consistent evidence linking styrene to cancer.
• EFSA's June 2025 reassessment, the most rigorous such review in decades, found no evidence of harm from polystyrene packaging at real-world exposure levels. Commercial polystyrene products routinely come in well below EFSA's conservative safety limit.
• The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies styrene, the liquid ingredient used to make polystyrene, as Group 2A, the same category as the consumption of red meat and drinking very hot beverages.
• A 2019 risk assessment sponsored by the Styrene Information and Research Center, peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, synthesized more than 30 years of research and found no meaningful consumer health risk and no consistent evidence that styrene causes cancer in the general population.
• Recycled polystyrene meets the same food-contact safety bar as virgin material. Dissolution-recycled PS resin has been cleared for FDA food contact since 2013 and has been measured at 87% below EFSA's safety limit.

The report also draws a direct connection between polystyrene's safety record and its circularity case, serving as a companion to the PSRA circularity report released in June 2026. Polystyrene's chemical stability is the basis of both its food-contact safety record and its recyclability. The same material properties that allow polystyrene to safely transport food, medicine, and large appliances make it well-suited for recovery and reuse through mechanical, dissolution, and chemical recycling.

Riney continued, "The FDA, EFSA, and decades of independent research have examined this material and reached consistent conclusions. This report makes those conclusions accessible and builds the evidentiary record that stakeholders and policymakers need to make informed decisions."

To download Polystyrene: The Safety Record, click here.

To download Polystyrene: The Safety Record Infographic, click here.

About the Polystyrene Recycling Alliance (PSRA)

The Polystyrene Recycling Alliance (PSRA) unites the entire polystyrene (PS) and expanded polystyrene (EPS) value chain to promote circularity for polystyrene products across North America. PSRA is a self-funded initiative of the PLASTICS Industry Association. Learn more at www.PSRecycling.org.