Recycling is an important and necessary method of waste and resource management. In this method, products no longer useful by the people possessing them are taken, often dismantled and remanufactured, and then resold to be reused.
Resource Management
Recycling allows us to reuse resources already removed from the ground, forest, or other location. Instead of gathering more, we simply take what we have and convert it into a form that allows it to be reused, reducing the load on the natural resource consumption and slowing the pace of depleting the almost non-renewable resources. Recycling will also often require less energy and/or money than collecting more of the equivelant resource. The costs would be reduced further through larger scale, more efficient recycling programs.
Waste Management
Recycling prevents a potentially very large portion of our waste from being shred up into a mixed collection of materials made toxic by some of its contents that is then piled in a heap that will require clean up at some point in the future. The costs of recycling will be lower in the long run than costs of cleaning up the mounds of waste otherwise created. The increase in useable land and decrease in toxic seapage damaging to life are also significant benefits of recycling.
Go to Earth911 for more information about recycling and where facilities are in your area.