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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

I believe that recycling aluminum takes significantly less energy than smelting it in the first place.

I don't have any idea about plastics/papers.

Post-consumer paper can be recycled in to some forms of low-density card that doesn't require high quality pulp. Egg cartons come to mind, and as a percentage in some packaging, newsprint and sanitary papers. Post-consumer paper cannot easily be recycled in to anything resembling printer paper due to the contaminants. Pre-consumer paper is recycled heavily as it's of known quality.

I'm not aware of any plastics that are recycled in to the same form. I know that PET (1) and HDPE (2) are recycled in to fibres.

It's a similar story to glass, certainly where I live a large amount of glass is recycled in to crushed aggregate rather than new bottles. The energy costs of cleaning don't make it worthwhile.

Glass bottles used to be reused, which is the responsible thing to do.

Consumers didn’t like it because scratches accumulate on the outside of the bottles.

I always thought it was a shame that we stopped doing that, but plastic has taken over pretty much for all the glass bottles that used to be recycled.

Aluminum is the only part of recycle that is really profitable. That's way people picking through trash take the cans and nothing else.

Everyone I've seen do this takes bottles too, and it's because they can redeem the bottles and cans to collect a state-mandated deposit.

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