Resources & recycling

The empty drink can, the old yoghurt pot, the broken phone: all of it is full of raw materials that were once dug out of the earth. Throw it away and it is lost. Collect it separately and it can go back into the cycle. Here you look at how much recycling really achieves.

Raw materials are finite

Metals, crude oil and sand do not lie in the earth without limit. Once something is mined, it does not grow back. That is why it is smart not to use materials only once. Recycling means: the old becomes the raw material for the new. Melt a can down and it becomes a new can, again and again.

The recycling rate tells you how well a material stays in the cycle. It says what percentage of the collected material really becomes new material again. For glass and aluminium that rate is high, for plastic it is low.

Aluminium saves energy

Producing aluminium fresh from ore costs a great deal of electricity. Melting down recycled aluminium, by contrast, needs only a small fraction of that: around one twentieth of the energy. That is why collecting cans and foil pays off especially. Every can that goes back into the cycle saves the energy its fresh production would have cost.

Why plastic is difficult

With plastic, recycling is trickier. There are many different types, and they are hard to separate cleanly. But good recycling needs sorting purity: mixed plastics only yield low-grade material. That is why part of it is burned instead of reused. Separately collected, single-type plastic has the best chance of becoming something new again.