The Down-Low on Down-Cycling

It’s no secret that products made from recycled materials generally do not hold a perfect 1:1 similarity to the products from which they came. If you look at a piece of office paper made from recycled materials, you may notice that it’s grainier, flimsier, and, when you get right down to it, just not the same. This is largely because of a process called “down-cycling”; many recyclables go through this process, and it is unavoidable. Most materials, when going through the recycling process, see some sort of degradation in structural integrity or usefulness. This is not, of course, to say that recycling these down-cycled products is not worth the time or effort, but by looking at those items that do not undergo down-cycling, we can see an untapped resource of perpetually useful materials.

Lots of this is common sense; if you had to guess which materials hold up the best after repeated reuse, would paper be at the top of the list? I doubt it. While it may seem somewhat durable at first glance, would you guess that plastic is there either? Maybe you have plastic things around your home that you’ve reused, but it still pales in comparison to the really sturdy stuff. Glass and metal, especially aluminum recycling, all yield products that are nearly structurally equivalent to the materials that went into them. Do you have a work-bench at home? If so, where do you keep your screws, nails, nuts, and bolts? If you’re anything like the dozen or so people I know with work-benches in their homes, it’s probably just a washed out old jelly jar. The reusability of an item is often directly correlative to how efficiently it can be recycled. If something is sturdy in this incarnation, it will maintain much of that function when it is reclaimed.

Aluminum recycling often shows these same earmarks of usefulness. Much like the cleaned out jelly jar, you may have an old coffee can, or oil can that you use to store little odds and ends. You may not even be sure why you picked that item to store them when they could so easily go in a drawer-this is because we’re constantly sizing up items for their longevity. Will it be of use, for how long, etc.

The problem is that we don’t tend to connect this trait to an item’s potential for recycling. We make the logical fallacy that because we find ourselves always throwing “thing X” away, that “thing X” would be a perfect candidate for recycling. We recycle almost 70% of our office paper because it’s obvious to us that we blow through it, but when we break a glass we pick up the shards and throw them in the trash, even though if it were recycled it would save more creation costs than a couple of reams of office paper. To truly make the most of recycling we need to look at the material itself, and not just how often we use it.

Written by Mark Montoya, an industry writer for a metal recycling company.