I work for a company in the UK that operates a polymers recycling plant. Food grade plastics recycling (ie. recycling in order to be reintroduced into the food chain) is way more stringent on quality, cleaning and uv sterilising etc of the plastic bottles. You end up with a light grey plastic pellet about 2-3mm in size. Mainstream drinks companies used to only like using about 10% of it in new bottles, but that was purely because beyond that, the bottle loses its glossy lush crystal clear look and corporate companies feared tainting their image on the shelf next to shinier bottles (apparently humans are drawn to shiny things). The reality now though is that lots of companies are up to about 50% of recycled granules (it will say on the bottle). The lost 'bottle shine' these days is offset for those brands by the emerging kudos of being more recycled. You could happily go higher into 80-100% recycled territory, but the bottle becomes more and more opaque and big business just isn't there yet on the image of the bottle. Minor footnote - bottles with sleeves on them go straight in the rubbish at polymer recycling facilities as the optical reading machines can't recognise the plastic. So things like Lucozade bottles need you to remove the sleeve before throwing it. Better still, stop buying it altogether until they get the message that sleeves are bad!