Recycling Resources: Today's Garbage is Tomorrow's Toy

My own thinking suggests that we are even closer to the "tipping point" wherein end-to-end recycling may offer resources at costs equivilent to raw material production and transportation costs. Some proof is descovered in the "numbers" of some researchers who see the percentages of recycling of many valuable ores and minerals as indicative of calculatiosn made by producers that recycling materials offer equivilent or even lower costs that buying and transporting raw materials from origin sources like existing mines. Demand exceeds amounts currently produced from recycling.

To be successful, however, it must truly be a production recycling process wherein all of the material is recycled to it's "highest value reuse."

Therefore recycling plastic into road materials is not a highest value reuse, but plastics into plastics is.

Research beyond what is available today is required to process a diversified stream of raw materials, organic and inorganic, into a finished series of highest value materials for reuse in the manufacturing of everything from foodstuffs to materials for furniture, toys and building materials.

This new "alchemy" of recycling will slow, not eliminate, the process or sourcing, mining, processing and transporting materials, because populations and standards of living are constantly growing, even accelerating in much of the world.

Fortunately (unfortunately) most of the world's easily discovered and processed raw materials, including energy sources, are in play. However, 80% plus of the earth's mineral, and energy, resources remain yet to be discovered.

They are high(er) cost sources to be sure, but their cost is a component ofwhat drives the tipping point calculations of recycling from end-to-end.
Eventually, earth's population will (hopefully)stabilize; living standards will be mostly "balanced," and recycling will generate most of the materials needed for all of the production of goods and services.