recycling

Pluralrecyclings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The practice of sorting and collecting waste materials so they can be processed into new products.

   The town's recycling has noticeably reduced the amount of landfill waste.

   Effective recycling depends on residents separating materials correctly before collection.

   Similarreprocessing, reclamation

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of recycle.

   The factory is recycling scrap metal into new components.

   Recycling household plastics has become routine for many families.

   Note

   The verb form shares its spelling with the noun for the practice, and grammar tells them apart. As a gerund it keeps the verb's power to take a direct object, as in recycling household plastics, where the noun would need of. It also carries every use of recycle, including the intransitive one meaning "to be recycled" and the US sense of putting a person through training again.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The materials that have been gathered together to be processed for new use.

   She carried the recycling out to the curb before the truck arrived.

   Half the recycling was contaminated with food waste and had to be thrown out.

   Similarrecyclables

   Note

   Here the name of the practice is turned onto the stuff itself, the sorted waste waiting to be collected. It is uncountable, so it takes the or some, never a: you haul the recycling in on Saturday. Context separates it from the practice of recycling. If it can be carried, set out or contaminated, it is the materials, not the activity.

4. 4
   nounfigurativelycountable or uncountable

   A thing produced by reusing the parts, materials, or ideas of something that already existed.

   Critics dismissed the sequel as a recycling of plots from the original trilogy.

   Her latest essay reads as a recycling of ideas she published years ago.

   Similarrehash, rehashing, reworking

   Note

   Most often this is figurative: a new work built out of an old one. In Wayne Jancik's The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders (1990), Eddie Holman is remembered for his "soulful, falsettoed" recycling of Ruby & The Romantics' 1963 hit "Hey There Lonely Boy." Used this way it is countable and usually takes of followed by the original: a recycling of a song, a plot or an argument.

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