REUSE AND RECYCLING OF MATERIALS

Everybody know that one of the great problems that humanity presents is environmental
pollution, the environment is being affect by many factors, one of them is the mismanagement of
waste from various fields such as the food industry, construction, metallurgy, etc. For this,
different environmental care methods have been implemented, such as the three Rs, which seek
to build a recycling-oriented society and consist of REDUCING, REUSING, and RECYCLING. In this
essay we will mainly talk about the importance of reusing and recycling materials in the world.

The field of materials is quite wide, it is formed by four families of different materials, metal
materials, ceramic materials, polymer materials and composite materials. Therefore, one of the
great challenges for material engineers is to find reuse methods for each type of material, to
reduce the amount of waste and to care for the environment.

Metal materials: Metal recycling helps significantly to contribute to the improvement of the
environmental situation, as recycling scrap reduces water, air and waste pollution by a high
percentage. A great advantage of metal recycling, compared to paper, is that the number of times
it can be recycled is unlimited, but it cannot be recycled at home. The metal recycling process
consists of cutting it into small pieces, melting it at high temperatures and giving it a new shape.

Ceramic materials: Due to the properties of ceramics, they have a longer service life than other
materials. However, these same properties also make them difficult to recycle. In most companies
that work with ceramics use bad products as raw material for the next production. Glass is the
only ceramic material that can be reused 100%. Metal recycling consists of cutting it into small
pieces, melting it at high temperatures and giving it a new shape.

Polymer materials: Polymers are the main materials of study in reuse and recycling, as normally a
polymeric material is discarded after use and lasts many years to decompose directly affecting the
environment. The main difficulty with polymers is that, unlike ceramics and metals after recycling,
they do not become the same initial product.

Composite materials: Composite materials are those that are formed by the union of two or more
materials to achieve the combination of properties better than the original ones. For this reason
the reuse of these materials depends a lot on the type of materials used in their manufacture. If
the composite material includes ceramics and metals, its recycling is easier than if the compound
contains polymers because more complex processes would be needed for its separation and
reuse.

In conclusion, the recycling of materials is a very wide field of study and with many possibilities for
the future in order to improve the environmental situation that is experienced worldwide.
Therefore, this study should be carried out in the shortest possible time in order to provide rapid
solutions to this problem.