How does recycling work?

recycling is when material from a consumed finished product like a soda or newspaper are used to make new material. in case of sodas, the aluminum can used to contain the soda is melted and turned into a sheet of aluminum which is then rolled or shaped into a soda can again or into any other shape like rain water gutters for the roof of a house or slotted window frames. newspaper is mashed, with water to remove the ink, bleached and turned into new paper for printing either a new issue of a newspaper or magazine of paper for notebooks. almost everything can be recycled, if we have the desire and determination to do it. it also save the raw materials in nature, so we don't have to destroy too much of nature for those raw materials which can be attained from the waste we create.

Technically speaking, only one kind of plastic can be remade into the same product (it is either #1 or #2). The rest of the plastic resins can only be downcycled, which means they can be made into another product of inferior quality (plastic fencing for example) that will end up in the dumpster after one or or two cycles.

You may wonder why plastics carry the recycling symbol in them then. Apparently this was a marketing plot to make oil based disposables more palatable to the public, while at the same time, they needed to stamp a code for the kind of resin used, so they could be downcycled properly because different resins melt at different temperatures.

Bear in mind that plastic gets easily contaminated (that's why you can't reuse a disposable syringe) and becomes brittle over time and breaks (just check out those garden plastic chairs after a few years, specially if exposed to sunlight).

I guess what I want to say in answering this, is that to a large extent, recycling has been adopted by industry in many cases just to sell more of a bad product at cheaper prices. As convenient as plastic can be, as well as metal and glass, we need to remember that the most effective means of being a less parasitic creature is by avoiding cheap single use products that put a burden to the environment, from that carryout container, to that sugary drink, whatever is the "recyclable" container in which it is stored. Recycling comes third after "reduce" and "reuse" for a reason.

A great website to learn how various items are recycled is www.earth911.com. There are videos and other information about each type of material. There are a lot of differences depending on where you live and what the material will be used for.

Plastics, glass, Aluminum get melted down and reused. Tin and iron thou not as easy also gets melted down and re-used. They have plants that treat paper so it can be re-used some is serenaded and used as packing sold to farmers for bedding same with cardboard.