Many cities such as New York City encourage recycling. Items that are recycled are often packaging for products bought at a grocery store. For example, cereal boxes, canned food cans, etc.
While cardboard and metallic packaging is easy to identify, plastics are much more difficult. Whether they're recyclable or not depends, presumably on the type of plastic or its thickness.
Either way, recycling everything that can be recycled is the goal in order to reduce waste. Manufacturers should be required by law, as in Europe for example, to print a recycling logo in the product's packaging in order to let the consumer know that this particular item can be recycled. I would assume the manufacturer will benefit since more recycling will lead to lower costs of procuring raw recycled material.