For a material to actually be recycled, it must be collected, sorted, reprocessed and there must be a market for the recycled material. Additionally, the quality of the material has to be good enough to be utilized as raw material in new products.
Paper and cardboard, for example, have a high recycling rate: over 80 percent in Europe and almost 70 percent in the United States. Paper and cardboard have been industrially recycled for decades, and there is both a wide recycling infrastructure and an established market for recycled materials. However, collecting and recycling systems vary from one country to another.
Bio-based materials with existing recycling value chains, such as plastic made from the pulping residue tall oil, could be recycled via the existing recycling chains. This is one reason why they are called drop-in solutions. Bio-attribution has no adverse effect on their recyclability.
Some plastics with a bio-based origin, such as polylactic acid (PLA), can technically be recycled. Unfortunately, recycling value chains are not yet installed due to the current small quantity of recyclable material.