There is a lot of talk about recycling. It is often hyped as a solution to our solid waste problem and as a way to cut down on the need for new products. The only problem is that recycling typically produces lower quality products out of already low quality products. You take a soda bottle and you turn it into a sweater, that gets thrown out eventually.

There simply is too many products that we scrap without even trying to repair them or reuse them. There is an alternative: taking existing products, refurbishing, rebuilding, or re-manufacturing them and reselling them. With many products there is no reason why the factory that made them can't take them back and make new product in them.

For example, you can easily turn an old washing machine into a new one by replacing the worn parts – rather then sending it to the scrap yard, were it is melted down and the metal goes into another use. Why wouldn't you just want to just melt down the old one and get a new one – rather then getting a partially used machine back?

1. Save energy. It takes a massive amount of energy to melt steel back down into steel. Indeed, many electric arc furnaces use as more electricity then a city the size of Albany. Generating electricity means burning coal and other polluting substances that reduce our air quality and cause global warming.
2. Chemicals continue to be useful. There are a variety of chemicals that are used in making washing machines that often do not wear out and could serve a future life. These include paints that become toxins in the air at the electric arc furnace and wire coatings that become dangerous sludge at the landfill.
3. Save existing labor. It took a lot of work to make the machine. Why virtually throw that all away, and start all over? If we put the amount of money it takes to make a machine from raw materials and spent it on improving the existing washing machine, you would get a better product at a lower cost.

Re-manufacturing sounds really good. You are only discarding or scrapping what is broken and can no longer be used, and reusing the rest to it's highest value. This greatly reduces pollution over traditional recycling and throw-away approaches. That said, re-manufacturing is plagued by certain technical and social problems that need to be overcome including:

• Lack of Knowledge of Properties of Materials After Stress. We know amazing little about the properties of steel and other mechanical devices under the stress of regular use. Few studies have done on common household products to see what wears out and what does not. Increasingly, such research is happening and is possible to judge the safety and reliability of a product after some time of use. We do it already with critical infrastructure such as bridges and highways, so why not household devices?
• Public Perception That Manufactured Means Used. People tend to perceive re-manufactured as inferior to new products which may or may not be made of recycled products. Too often the rebuilt or re-manufactured products of yesterday were of inferior quality to new products. Our growing knowledge of the property of materials and increased use of science in the re-manufacture of products is making products more reliable today, but they aren't perfect.

You probably are using re-manufactured products already. You have bought refurbished electronic products online, a re-manufactured starter or transfer case motor for your pickup, and exchanged your ink charges for refilled ones. Most of those products were incredibly reliable. There is no reason why they can't be as reliable as new ones, with careful inspection and testing of the materials to ensure they in their new life are in the highest quality.

Recycling is one way to reduce our solid waste. Yet, it often makes only low value products that are often contaminated from their previous use. That greatly decreases their value when recycled, and increases the likelihood that they will be tossed in the future. We should instead focus on promoting quality re-manufactured products and getting our used products back to places where they can be rebuilt into new machines.