Being able to reuse or recycle a material doesn't make it less energy intensive to acquire in the form you need it to be for your purposes. I don't know why you think otherwise.
I don't know, if I reuse or recycle something it's cheaper or free.
For instance, a restaurant may reuse utensils by washing them. Or recycle crates by using them as decorations.
That's the whole point of reusing and recycling. Reducing my cost. Even if something is more energy intensive to create, it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.
> That's the whole point of reusing and recycling. Reducing my cost.
When reuse or recycling is saving consumers money and/or making companies money, everyone already does it. Things like salvaging copper wiring from old buildings or putting wrecked cars into junk yards to be stripped of useful parts and scrapped.
> Even if something is more energy intensive to create, it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.
This assumes the cost of getting raw materials is greater than that of salvaging old materials. This is true for metals which is why you see people collecting used cans or recycling phones for "free". But it's not true for plastics (petroleum is ridiculously cheap and easy to get) which is why you don't see corporations fighting to collect the Pacific garbage patch or offering free recycling services for consumers to get at their waste plastic.
Lol tf? Plastics typically are not reusable, so now you're left with recycling. Many plastics like PET can be pretty easily recycled and come in few colors. It's unfortunate that there are also there are piles of different plasitc formulations that cannot be mixed and easily recycled. It's easy and cheap to mix pure feeds took, it's not easy to get the plasticizers and coloration out.
Your example of reusing utensils assumes cleaning is free.
Let's say that COVID v2 requires restaurants to sterilize utensils so thoroughly that it costs $1000 per utensil. Obviously at that point most restaurants would opt to just buy new utensils each time.
Reuse, sure, but I doubt you have the equipment required to recycle paper, glass, metals, plastic, etc. If you did, I'm sure you'd know that equipment was probably pretty expensive to purchase, and far from free to operate.
> Or recycle crates by using them as decorations.
That's not really "recycling", that's just another form of reuse.
> it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.
That's if it's being reused. Most people don't reuse all that much of what they consume. Think soda cans or bottles, jars of peanut butter or jams, plastic laundry detergent containers, paper or plastic grocery bags, etc. Most of that ends up being thrown away after being used once.
It's great when people reuse those things over and over after their initial use, but the reality is that very few people actually do so.
All of this is why very little of the plastic we toss in recycling bins actually gets recycled. It's just not economically feasible to recycle all that plastic. For decades now we've shipped all of it overseas, but a lot of those places have stopped taking our plastic, because they don't want it either.
Imagine there's a material A that there's only 100,000 of left.
It takes only 1 energy to consume it and turn it into a single product. Also using it could cause -5 damage to the environment.
You realize however that it is not sustainable, it's going to be done at some point in the future.
You start to look for solutions. You find a new material that can replace the other material B, however it's not as good for making the products. It takes 5 energy to consume it and it takes 3 energy to make the product and then when recycled it takes another 3 energy.
> a restaurant may reuse utensils by washing them.
Can't just the employee cost of gathering and placing them in a dishwasher, the fraction of the cost of the dishwasher machine itself, sorting them out, replacing the quantity that got stolen or thrown in the garbage by mistake or damaged, the accounting of mistakes where dirty or otherwise unsanitary ones are handed to customers, etc... exceed the cost of disposable?
It's not a theoretical concern. Or at least any theoretical concern is not hugely useful in the practical operation of a restaurant.
But if you're not reusing things as they are, at the site where you already have it, then you need a whole system to collect, clean, and sort it.
Additionally, the price of new materials does not include what it costs to get rid of them, nor does it typically include the cost of fixing what gets destroyed (like nature or human fertility) when its made or discarded.
Weird.
Being able to reuse or recycle a material doesn't make it less energy intensive to acquire in the form you need it to be for your purposes. I don't know why you think otherwise.