Recycling is the process of converting post-industrial and post-consumer wastes into new materials and objects. Still, this concept is often coined to the recovery of energy from wastes (sadly, as a fraction only of the energy in remaking the wasted material or product). The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to reacquire the properties it had in its original state. It is an alternative to "conventional" waste disposal that can save materials and help lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from having to replace the scraped goods. It can also prevent the waste of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reducing energy uses, air pollution (from incineration), and water contamination (from landfilling leakages).

Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the fourth component of the "Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, and Recycle" waste hierarchy. It promotes environmental sustainability by removing raw material input and redirecting waste outputs into the economic system. Some ISO standards relate to recycling, such as ISO 15270:2008 for plastics waste and ISO 14001:2015 for environmental management control of recycling practices.

Unfortunately, “reduce” is commonly understood as using less of a product or using it for a longer time not to have to use a new such product as a replacement to the discarded product. Rather, it should also be understood as using less material in a product, which saves on GHG emissions in harvesting raw materials and the energies to transform such materials into compounds for making the product, and less energies and associated GHG in actually manufacturing the product.

Sadly, products in general, per 1. Material, 2. Design, to 3. Processing, not to say from the standpoints of all three ingredients to product development, still result from “trial-and-error” in many instances, in all industrial sectors. Prototypes are built for testing, results of which, are used to alter compounds, in the case of polymers for example, shapes (thus molds or dies), and/or (manufacturing) processes, as new prototypes are further tested until satisfactory polymer products are reached. Indeed, if any analysis is done at all, it is seldom undertaken prior to making a product (meaning before coming up with a resin or a compound and the shape of a product, building tooling, prototyping parts, and running tests for adjustments and validation). Rather, analysis is often requested as a last resource, to troubleshoot problems with aspects to the development process, after the fact.

Such a sequential approach to developing polymer products delays the entry to market (any sequence of compounding, tooling, prototyping, and testing is weeks to months long). Besides, any change during prototyping adds to the budget of programs (and the more, the later a change is to take place). In the end, a limited integration of Computer-aided Manufacturing and Engineering or CAM/CAE) involving Computational Fluid Dynamic and Finite Element Analysis or CFD/FEA, results in inefficiencies and a lack of design creativity (seldom, experience alone suffices, and one needs to use modern tools and simulation, which, unlike trial-and-error, are reproducible). Besides, companies stop at any working solution, as they seldom have time/money/interest left to attempt to optimize such solution through simulation (even though models would have been built, which should help further in reaching limits in compounds, product and tooling designs, and manufacturing processes, for the application troubleshot to be optimized).

Today’s polymer product development ought to integrate compound development and characterization, to product and tooling parametric CAD (Computer-aided Design) and CAM/CAE to reasonable accuracies (less than 15% error of real life). Rubber products still need to go through “what-if?” scenarios. However, these operations take place in the “virtual world”: They are computer-generated through FEA/CFD simulations.