Unfortunately, these containers can be made of recyclable plastic or non-recyclable plastic.
You will need to check the plastic resin numbers on the package:
The most common numbers you will see on such containers are:
Most common:
- #5 Polypropylene aka PP - recyclable
Others:
- #1 PET - recyclable
- #2 HDPE - recyclable
- #4 LDPE - recyclable
- #7 others - not recyclable
And sometimes there is no number at all which means it is not recyclable.
Some brands have proprietary blends of plastic which are not recyclable in local recycling systems (eg rubbermaid).
And to make it even more complicated, the lid may not be the same kind of plastic. The lids rarely have a resin number and have to be thrown away.
Even for those recyclable plastics, the recycling rates tend to be very low. Only about 1% of PP is recycled globally because there is very low demand for this kind of post-consumer plastic in the 2nd hand market. LDPE is even lower.
