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Interesting that you bring up Apple here considering the fact that it's latest products cannot be recycled due to design decisions (I.e., melding the glass display onto the frame)

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A clean separation of materials is not required at the recycling facility, at least in theory, as most of the recycling methods being explored involve shredding the product up front and separating the resulting bits.

The recycling process becomes extremely complicated when the composition of the materials is non-uniform. The common worst offender in this regard is plastic bottles with several different types of plastic layered together. The opposite is a glass bottle with a metal cap.

Provided you can smash and pulverize a product into sufficiently fine pieces you can separate it by material.

Current recycling techniques cannot (supposedly) deal with this, but it's likely that new methods could be developed which could. Ideally, Apple's designers would actually work directly with recycling centers to develop a strategy for efficient recycling of their product. This could even be done later on, when the existing product is replaced with a new version.

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