Recycling and mathematics.

Recycling Recycling is the extraction of usable materials out of used objects. Materials that are often recycled at the start of the twenty-first century include metal, paper, glass, and plastic. One important mathematical problem of recycling is the comparison of environmental and monetary costs of recycling and virgin production. Mathematicians are also involved in developing new methods for recycling and modeling both economic and environmental impacts. The notion of “algorithm recycling” applies to resources used in some mathematical investigations. For example, statistical bootstrap recycling reuses samples to minimize demands on computational resources. Some mathematicians, scientists, educators, and others use recycling for education, recreation, and art. Mario Marin has designed polyhedral outdoor play spaces and kinetic sculptures from recycled and remaindered materials and has published many creative ways to recycle household objects, like plastic bottles, into interesting polyhedral structures. With regard to learning, some have even suggested a concept called “neuronal recycling,” which refers to adaption of neuronal circuits for new uses.