recycle

verb

1. (transitive)To break down and reuse component materials.

   “Both paper and plastic can be recycled.”

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

2. (figuratively, transitive)To reuse as a whole.

   “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.”

   “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.”

   “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.”

3. (intransitive, transitive)To collect or place in a bin for recycling.

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

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

   “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.”

   “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.”

4. (ergative, intransitive)To be recycled.

   “Sulfur recycles in the sulfur cycle.”

5. (US)To discard into a recycling bin.
6. (US, transitive)To 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.”

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

noun

1. An act of recycling.

   “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.”

   “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.”