Recycling – Its Origins and The Future Recycling originated in the smallest of ways and for one simple purpose; it was more economical. But with the scale of production today recycling is the only sustainability solution available. Recycling is conducted today for purposes that benefit manufacturers more than the environment. Recycling does take care of both the environment and the manufacturers. For manufacturers recycled feed-stock in many ways reduces cost and limits the use of resources resulting in increased profits. The environment benefits by the reduction of resources used to produce raw materials for consumer products and the pollution that is the result of preparing the products themselves.
Recycling originated in the smallest of ways and for one simple purpose; it was more economical. More economical to re-melt metals and give them a new shape and form, than to obtain ore and produce virgin metal for the same purpose. Recycling simply made more sense back then; but today the scale of recycling and changes in consumer behaviour have led to problems on a global scale. Every product produced today has to be produced in millions. When these products reach the end of their product lifecycle, they get discarded; again in the millions. Where does all of this waste go? Landfills would be one way of getting them out of sight, but not without consequences. This is why recycling has always been and always will be an industry that exists. The items that get recycled have also changed over time, recycling took off with scrap metal traders who would find and collect metals along with scrap metal recyclers, who would find, collect, segregate and recycle metals either as new products or as raw materials. Today it involves a wide variety of metals that come from a number of industries such as construction, automotive, food and beverage etc. Rubber, glass, ferrous metal scrap, non-ferrous scraps metals, plastics and paper make up for the huge chunk of materials that are recycled today.
However all of this maybe set to change in the near future with the use of materials in production that can be recycled more efficiently with minimal resources required to produce a new product. But such a system would need a perfect and stringent recycling structure in place along with the necessary resources to make it happen. The idea is to change and modify the materials for better recyclability than to create a material and then decide how to discard or take care of it. Until then metal recycling with the help of scrap metal traders and scrap metal recyclers will still be the most efficient and well-structured system in place.