How does recycling deal with food and junk on bottles and cans?
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If bottles are well sorted (as they are in germany/nordic countries and a few other places) the recycling plant has a pretty clean recovery where the bottles consist of PET/aluminium/glass plus labels/glue and mostly food junk.
This means that they can be put through a combination of sorting, washing, mechanical shredding, filtering, caustic soda before being remelted into new stuff, but the core of the process is “these are relatively uniform flakes of either PET plastic, aluminium or crushed glass. And that means it behaves mechanically and chemically different from junk like glue, labels and food waste so it can be sorted and filtered until you get a pure end product that can then be reused”
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