>>471155>recycling methods>how effectivematerial recovery rates are pretty decent
Labor productivity is terrible, most recycling methods still involve people picking out bits from a trash-conveyor-belt.
Plenty of recycling methods are atrocious, for example in very poor countries people are made to burn electronic waste to recover metals
Some types of material recycling have fully automated separation processes tho.
There are huge gaping holes in recycling techniques, certain materials have not gotten any love in terms of somebody developing a recovery process.
You can use a high temperature electro plasma torch to heat up material until all molecular bonds dissolve and then separate out elements by molecular weight. Commercial machines that do this exist, but currently only do really small quantities. For industrial scales they need engineering investment to tag-on some thermal recovery systems to become reasonably energy efficient. The plasma recycler is best suited as a last stage in a recycling chain where it catches what previous less intensive recycling stages missed.
A industrial scale plasma recycler would be extremely potent technology that could be modified to extract and concentrate trace radioactive elements that are universally present in all stuff, so it will require nuclear inspections to make sure that it's not being abused for illicit fissionable material enrichment. Pretty much all technology that is sufficiently advanced is going to require this type of inspection, even in high tech botany there are gmo-plants designed for soil decontamination that carry a similar risk, so don't hold this against it.As an industry the recycling sector is pretty underdeveloped, but that also means there is plenty of low hanging fruit.