Other forms: recycling, recycled, recycles
To recycle is to turn used material into something that can be used again. Bottles into bottles, paper into paper.
It is the third of the three Rs after reduce and reuse, and the least effective of them, which is worth knowing, since reducing what you buy does far more than sorting it afterwards. Glass and aluminium recycle almost indefinitely and plastic degrades each time. The noun is recycling, which names both the process and the material. There is a figurative use about ideas being reused.
1verbrecycleTo process used material so it can be used again.
“Almost all of the packaging can be recycled.”
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷel-
Middle English
cicle
English
cycle
English, today
recycle
From re- + cycle. cycle comes from Middle English cicle. From Middle English cicle (“fixed length period of years”), from Latin cyclus, from Ancient Greek κύκλος (“circle”), from Proto-Hellenic kúklos, kʷókʷlos, from Proto-Indo-European kʷékʷlos (“circle, wheel”). a doublet of chakra and chakram and charkha and chukker and cyclus and kike and wheel (see there for more).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA