Closed loop recycling is the process of (continually) converting waste materials into new materials of equal or higher quality so they can be reapplied for their original (or a comparable) purpose. Therefore, recycling a high quality material into a material of lesser quality is considered down cycling because it preserves less of the original value.

While different materials commonly used in packaging (such as metals, cardboard or glass) all require different recycling techniques, a generic recycling process always consists of the following steps:

1. Waste packaging collection.
2. (Manual or automated) separation of different materials and/ or sorting by type.
3. Reprocessing waste packaging into new raw materials.
4. Applying recycled materials to manufacture new packaging.

The video below depicts the recycling process for metal packaging:

Availability of this video might be hindered on mobile devices. The video, with an automatically generated transcript, is available on YouTube.

This video Metal recycles forever by Stichting Kringloop Blik is released under the default YouTube license.

Stichting Kringloop Blik granted the TU Delft permission to use this video in this course. No other rights or permissions are granted beyond the bound of this course.