recycle

present singular third person recycles · participle present recycling · participle past recycled · past recycled

1. transitiveTo break down and reuse component materials.

   Both paper and plastic can be recycled.

   1 more example

   Recycling and reusing the material eliminates the need to import aggregate, a strategy which has avoided over 50,000 lorry movements on local roads.

   2024 May 29, “Network News: HS2's Bromford Tunnel portal complete ready for TBM breakthrough...”, in RAIL, number 1010, page 14

2. figurativelytransitiveTo reuse as a whole.

   He [Huw Jones] was hauled down in England’s 22 but, when the ball was quickly recycled, [Finn] Russell’s miss-pass gave Sean Maitland the room to score in the left corner.

   2018 February 24, Paul Rees, “Finn Russell masterminds historic Scotland victory over England”, in The Guardian, London, archived from the original on 22 Apr 2018

   2 more examples

   Jokes are recycled so frequently, it’s as if comedy writing was eating a hole in the ozone layer: If the audience had a nickel for every time a character on one side of the frame says something could never happen as it simultaneously happens on the other side of the frame, they’d have enough to pay the surcharge for the movie’s badly implemented 3-D.

   2012 July 12, Sam Adams, “Ice Age: Continental Drift”, in AV Club

   Now populists recycle communist verities: the fetishisation of working-class culture, the vision of a good “people” fighting a bad elite, the belief that the state should control business and the dismissal of parliamentary democracy as a bourgeois sham.

   2025 September 13, Simon Kuper, “How Maga rewrote the Little Red Book”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 18

3. intransitivetransitiveTo collect or place in a bin for recycling.

   Most cans, bottles, and jars need to be rinsed, so recycle while you are doing dishes.

   1990, Laurence Sombke, The Solution to Pollution: 101 Things You Can Do to Clean Up Your Environment, Sandy, Oregon: MasterMedia, p 22

   3 more examples

   Recycling is no longer a chore when this convenient recycling center is a fixture in your kitchen.

   2003, The Complete Guide to Easy Woodworking Projects: 50 Projects You Can Build With Hand Power Tools, Minneapolis: Creative Publishing International, page 270

   You'll find many configurations, including models that hide behind a single cabinet door and conceal from one to three bins, so you can recycle at the same spot where you dispose of trash.

   2006, Elaine Martin Petrowski, Design Ideas for Home Storage, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Creative Homeowner, page 133

   Who cares if you’re good-looking if you don’t recycle? Essentially, yes. Car-sharing, wearing patchwork clothes (signifying mending rather than throwing away) and carrying reusable coffee cups all came up as signs of environmentally virtuous behaviour.

   2026 March 2, “The greenest flags: virtue signals that help you find love – from patchwork clothes to car sharing”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

4. ergativeintransitiveTo be recycled.

   Sulfur recycles in the sulfur cycle.

5. USTo discard into a recycling bin.
6. UStransitivegovernmentTo put (a person) through a course of training again.

   Recruits cannot fail this portion of their training and become a Marine. Anyone who fails may be “recycled” through training up to three more times to try again, but will be sent home if success in this program is not achieved.

   2006, Barbara Schading, Richard Schading, A Civilian's Guide to the U.S. Military, page 102

7. roller derbyTo skate toward the rear of the engagement zone to maximize the time that an opposing jammer must spend before returning to the action.

   Synonyms: waterfall

plural recycles

1. An act of recycling.

   If the agency does not approve recycle of the cadet who failed to qualify, the cadet is sent home and is not hired by the department who sponsored him or her in the academy.

   2020, Gary Gray, MUD on MY BADGE

   1 more example

   First, there will be little reaction in the settler so that the concentrations of soluble constituents in the recycle stream are the same as those in the bioreactor. Because all soluble concentrations are the same, the recycle of soluble constituents around the system has no impact on system performance.

   2011, C. P. Leslie Grady, Jr.; Glen T. Daigger; Nancy G. Love, Biological Wastewater Treatment, Third Edition, page 189