Most flexible packaging on the market is a laminate of multiple different plastics — say, a PET outer layer bonded to a PE inner layer. That structure is excellent for performance, but standard recycling facilities are built to sort single-material streams, not separate bonded layers of different plastics. Printed with a "recyclable" symbol or not, multi-material laminates typically end up in general waste.
The mono-material alternative
A mono-material structure — commonly Mono-PE or Mono-PP — uses a single polymer family across every layer, sometimes with different grades of the same base resin to get the barrier and stiffness a multi-material structure would normally provide. Because it's chemically uniform, it can go through the same recycling stream as other PE or PP products.
The honest tradeoff
Mono-material structures have made major gains, but they still can't always match the barrier performance of a foil-based laminate for products with very short tolerance for oxygen or moisture exposure. For those, a genuinely recyclable claim may mean redesigning the target shelf-life or storage conditions, not just swapping the film.
If a "recyclable" claim matters to your brand, the question to ask your packaging supplier isn't whether the bag carries a recycling symbol — it's whether the structure is single-polymer enough to actually be accepted by the recycling streams your market uses.