Reversible Adhesives Point to Easier Recycling

The present recycling systems and processes are more than capable of doing the jobs as is in cost effective ways with every type of material that can be recycled for any reason. Hydraulics made cutting, chopping, and crushing everything from structural steel and concrete to stone easy and cost effective decades ago. Modern crushing, shredding, pulverizing and screening operations are also very effective at breaking down and recycling almost anything from vehicles to electronics by pulverizing them down into fine pieces that are easily sorted and reprocessed. Modern chemistry and chemical based processing also makes breaking most anything down to its most basic elemental components cost effective as well if the end products have a justified reclaiming value to begin with.

What limits recycling is not the taking apart aspect but simply the marketable value for the reclaimed materials. If the people who represent the source of the materials do not see a justified gain for their efforts to recycle then they simply wont. Also if the people making new items don't see the reclaimed materials as being of any resource value or have financial savings associated with using them then they wont buy them and reuse them as well.

I could care less about recycling most everything I have that does not pay me a justifiable return on it. I process and recycle several tons of steel and at times over a ton of copper and aluminum from old junk every year because the reclaim value for that material justifies my time and efforts. The many hundreds of pounds of plastics I end up with from stripping old vehicles and electronics equipment just get burned simply because no one pays me enough to want to bother doing anything with them other than toss it in the burnable trash and feed it to my boiler. For me the heat value from it is worth more than anything else at this point. All of the other other potentially recyclable materials I acquire or produce in a year that don't have any decent market value just get tossed a dumpster and sent to the landfill.

Gluing more stuff together will not motivate me one bit to recycle anything. Paying me more for that recyclable material will. There is a very good chance I represent far more of the population than most people will admit to. What I get in return for my efforts drives what I recycle. Fancy glues and making clueless half wit environmentalists happy has little to nothing to do with recycling anything on the larger scale.