Recycling by product massive number of types of plastic, they each carry a resin identification code, and must be sorted before they can be recycled. This can be costly; while metals can be sorted using electromagnets, no such 'easy sorting' capability exists for plastics. In addition to this, while labels do not need to be removed from bottles for recycling, lids are often made from a different kind of non-recyclable plastic. To help in identifying the materials in various plastic items, resin identification code numbers 1-6 have been assigned to six common kinds of recyclable plastic resins, with the number 7 indicating any
Resin identification code has also created a "How2Recycle" label in an effort to replace the RIC with that aligns more closely with how the public currently uses the RIC. Rather than indicating what type of plastic resin a product is made out of, the four "How2Recycle" labels indicate whether a plastic product is The "How2Recycle" labels also encourage consumers to check with local facilities to see what plastics each municipal recycling facility can accept. The different resin identification codes can be represented by Unicode icons ♳ (U+2673), ♴ (U+2674), ♵ (U+2675), ♶ (U+2676), ♷ (U+2677), ♸ (U+2678), and ♹ (U+2679). ♺ (U+267A) is