Cascade Recycling
Cascade recycling is a circular-economy strategy that repurposes materials through successive applications, typically with decreasing quality or complexity. Instead of immediate disposal or energy-intensive recovery, materials progress through a hierarchy of uses, such as timber becoming furniture, then particleboard, and finally insulation.
In contrast to open-loop recycling, which often requires significant energy to reprocess materials for different sectors, cascade recycling reduces energy use by sequencing applications to preserve material integrity for as long as possible.
This maximizes resource utility through low-energy transitions before final recovery, optimizing both thermodynamic efficiency and material value.
FAQ: What is the fundamental difference between Open-loop and Cascade recycling?
Answer: Strategic Lifecycle vs. Single-point Recovery
The key difference is that Open-loop recycling focuses on a single transformation, reusing a material in a different product category. Cascade recycling, however, is a systemic strategy that sequences multiple uses (from A to B to C) to extract maximum utility from a resource at each stage of physical degradation.