[TheNext]

ENTROPY JUST IS

Recycling is for stupid, illiterate, ignorant people who have poor education in economics and science. For some homeless it makes sense. Demanding children recycle is a form of mild abuse. Conformity to parent’s ignorance.

In other words, the requirement to reverse normal entropy is a very large energy source.

Tell that line to your recycling parents, teacher or state, then tell them to shut up and go get educated. Lol.

And no I will not explain it. Lol.

[zeugma]

Actually what it really boils down to more than anything else is the energy budget of recycling vs extracting metals from ore. The reason recycling aluminum is almost always something that makes sense is because it takes a lot of energy (mostly electricity) to refine aluminum, and takes almost none to recycle. Until we discovered how to use electricity to extract aluminum from ore, even though it is an incredibly abundant element in the earth's crust, aluminum was a precious metal. Some of the crown jewels of England are made of aluminum, because it was actually worth more than gold once-for-ounce.

Glass is fairly recyclable as well, depending upon your application. Paper and plastics? Not so much, because it takes about as much energy to recycle as it does to make new. You'd save on the raw material if it didn't cost as much as it does to sort, process, and transport recycled plastics. Unfortunately, those extra costs add up to enough, that for most applications it simply doesn't make sense.