Recyclable and recycled are not the same word

One describes a material in theory, the other describes what actually happened to it.

A material is recyclable if there exists a process that can turn it back into useful feedstock. Whether it is recycled depends on an entirely separate set of questions: whether a collection service near you accepts it, whether it survives the sorting equipment in use at that facility, whether it is clean enough, whether it arrives in a large enough stream to be worth separating, and whether anybody is currently buying the output. A label on a wrapper can only speak to the first question. It cannot speak to any of the others, because those vary by place.

This is why the honest answer to the question what should I do with this is that it depends entirely on where you live, and your local council is the authority. Collection rules, accepted materials and sorting capability differ between areas and change over time as facilities are upgraded or contracts change hands, and general guidance printed on a wrapper or repeated online may not match what your own service can handle this year. Checking your council's current advice is not a bureaucratic formality. It is genuinely the only reliable source, because the infrastructure it describes is the infrastructure your item will actually meet.

Understanding this distinction changes how you read packaging claims. A material being technically recoverable is a fact about chemistry and a modest amount of engineering, and it stays true everywhere. A material actually being recovered is a fact about local logistics, local investment and whether anyone currently wants to buy the recovered stuff, and it can differ between two adjoining suburbs. Both facts matter, but only one of them is a promise about your bin. When a wrapper implies the second while only supporting the first, it is not exactly untrue. It is simply answering a different question from the one you were asking.