Recycling is processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials,reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reduce energy usage, reduce air pollution and water pollution by reducing the need for "conventional" waste disposal, and lower greenhouse gas emissions as compared to virgin production.

Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the third component of the "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" waste hierarchy.

so,

we should recycle minerals because:

a) they are present in limited amount in nature.

b)in this way we can also reduce their wastage.

c) once they are exhausted they will not available to us.

Because the intial mining or harvesting of minerals is usually very expensive and quite harmful to the environment. Consider strip mining once. look at how much raw earth is displaced just to produce most of our consumed metals.

Here's an exersice. Get on yahoo maps and find Suriname, South America. Zoom in on the capitol Paramaribo. Stay far enough out that you can see the land on the east side of the river and switch into satelite view. All that farm land that you see, That is not farm land. The rain forest was clear cut. The trees were sold for hard wood and then the top layer of soil, 2 or 3 feet was scraped up. It is a thin layer of bauxite which is the ore that produces aluminum. How many 400 year old trees do you think they cleared in just 30 years to make your soda can and the body of the jets flying over us. And how many animals no longr have their habitat to live in. Can you say Alcoa.

This is why you want to recycle minerals, so that you have a planet with trees and forest and animals to leave to your children.

There exist two variables that increase the attractiveness of recycling:

1 The rising cost of virgin minerals

2 Waste disposal

By recovering and reintroducing materials into the system, recycling

provides an alternative to virgin ores and reduces the waste disposal

load.

PVM > PRM ! QR ? The Composition of demand e¤ect

As long as consumer bears the cost of disposal, they have additional

incentive to return their used recyclable products to collection centers.

To save our environment and energy. To extract minerals from scratch we have to work a lot and it is a waste of time as well as energy. If we recycle old minerals we can save both our time and energy. Extraction also produce more pollution, to reduce all these problems we have to recycle minerals.

Why shouldn't we?