h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The two things we recycle most are glass and aluminium - and yet these are by far the most common substances found in the earths crust - unless my school geography is very much mistaken.
What they have in common is that they use a vaste amount of energy in their extraction and it is this that we are really recycling...which makes glass and aluminium less expensive to use and so we use more of it.

At the other end of the spectrum, we still don't recycle enough of the rarer materials we use.
For example, lead is used to make solder, and is therefore a major pollutant when electronic equipment is discarded. But the electronics manufacturers argue against recycling and switching to lead-free solder because they say that only 1% of lead pollution is due to solder. What if every source of lead pollution said that?

Much easier to let the lead go, and transfer to lead-free so that in future there will be less pollution. Recycling is not cheap, and you have to do a cost-benefit analysis. Is the pollution caused by the transport (exhaust fumes), factories (god-knows-what) etc. involved in recycling lead less than the lead itself? I know it's not an easy comparison, but still...

Also, is there really that much lead in electronic equipment? I mean, a TV is pretty big, but the solder is pretty small. And only a certain proportion of that contains lead.

As for glass, etc. The benefits of recycling it again come down to the production pollution. It is more polluting to go through the process of converting silica to glass than it is to clean or melt existing glass. But what we really need is to make sure we wind down the production of new glass, look for alternatives to glass, and cut down on glass packaging. In fact, that goes for everything - we waste so much on packaging, etc.