It's no secret that products are made from recycled materials generally not a perfect 1:1 resemblance to the products from which they came. If you look at a piece of paper made from recycled materials, you will find that there grained, poor, and when you get right down to it, is simply not the same.
This is mainly because of a process called "down-cycling", and many recyclables go through this process, and it is inevitable. Most materials, when going through the recycling process you find some sort of reduction of structural integrity or usefulness. This is of course not to say that recycling these downcycling products is not worth the time and effort, but when I look at these items which do not undergo down-cycling, we can see an untapped resource of continually useful materials.
Much of this is common sense, if you had to guess which materials retain the best after repeated re-use, paper would be at the top of the list? I doubt it. While it may seem somewhat permanently at first glance, one would suspect that there is not plastic? Maybe you have plastic things around your house that you re-used, but it pales in comparison to the really tough material. Glass and metal, particularly aluminum recycling, all products that yield almost structurally equivalent to the materials that went into them there. Do you have a workbench at home? If so, where do you keep your screws, nails, nuts and bolts? If you are something like a dozen people I know with workbenches in their homes, it's probably just a washed out old jam jar. The reusability of an article is often directly correlate with how efficient it can be recycled. If something is robust in this incarnation, it will keep much of this function, when it recovered.
Recycling aluminum is often the same earmarks of usefulness. Similar to the jelly jar cleaned, you may have an old coffee can or oil can that you use to save little bits and pieces. You can not even be sure why you selected this element to save them if they could go into a drawer so easy, that's because we are constantly sizing up items for their longevity. Will it be useful, for how long, etc.
The problem is that we do not tend to this property to an element to combine the potential for recycling. We make the logical fallacy that because we find ourselves always throw "thing X" from that "thing X" would be a perfect candidate for recycling. We recycle almost 70% of our office paper, because it is obvious to us that we can blow through it, but if we break a glass we pick up the pieces and throw them in the trash, even though when it recycled, it would be more creation to save costs than a few tons of office paper. To really get the most out of recycling, we need to look at the material itself, and not just how often we use it....
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