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Recovery and recycling of materials that have been dispersed through pollution, waste and end-of-life product disposal require energy and resources, which increase in a nonlinear manner as the percentage of recycled material rises (owing to the second law of thermodynamics: entropy causing dispersion).
Plastic recycling is low in the waste hierarchy, meaning that reduction and reuse are more favourable and long-term solutions for sustainability. It has been advocated since the early 1970s, [36] but due to economic and technical challenges, did not impact the management of plastic waste to any significant extent until the late 1980s. The ...
An illustration of the allocation of avoided burden and recycling benefits across life cycles. Avoided burden (also known as the 0:100 method or end-of-life method) is an allocation approach used in life-cycle assessment (LCA) to assess the environmental impacts of recycled and reused materials, components, products, or buildings.
Zero waste promotes not only reuse and recycling but, more importantly, it promotes prevention and product designs that consider the entire product life cycle. [8] Zero-waste designs strive for reduced material use, use of recycled materials, use of more benign materials, longer product lives, repair ability, and ease of disassembly at end of ...
By reducing the production and use of raw materials, closed-loop recycling minimizes harm to the environment and discourages resource depletion. [5] In contrast, open-loop recycling is the process by which a product is recycled but has to be mixed with raw materials to become a new product, typically leading to downcycling .
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is sometimes referred to synonymously as life cycle analysis in the scholarly and agency report literatures. [7] [1] [8] Also, due to the general nature of an LCA study of examining the life cycle impacts from raw material extraction (cradle) through disposal (grave), it is sometimes referred to as "cradle-to-grave analysis".
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This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 15 February 2025. Converting waste materials into new products This article is about recycling of waste materials. For recycling of waste energy, see Energy recycling. "Recycled" redirects here. For the album, see Recycled (Nektar album). The three chasing arrows of the universal recycling symbol ...