Resource recovery in the context of "Life cycle analysis"

Waste management industry, or waste industry for short, subsumes all industrial branches concerned with waste management, waste dumping, waste recycling and - to a lesser degree - waste prevention.

Within Germany, waste management has evolved into a large economic sector. There are more than 270,000 people working in some 11,000 companies with an annual turnover of around 70 billion euros (~$78 billion). More than 15,500 waste management facilities help to conserve resources through recycling and other recovery operations. On a global scale, the market size is expected to reach $530.0 billion by 2025 from $330.6 billion in 2017, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.0%. The growth might even continue when, according to a World Bank report, global waste production will grow by 70% from 2018 to 2050, unless severe measures are taken.

Waste valorization, beneficial reuse, value recovery or waste reclamation is the process of waste products or residues from an economic process being valorized (given economic value), by reuse or recycling in order to create economically useful materials. The term comes from practices in sustainable manufacturing and economics, industrial ecology and waste management. The term is usually applied in industrial processes where residue from creating or processing one good is used as a raw material or energy feedstock for another industrial process. Industrial wastes in particular are good candidates for valorization because they tend to be more consistent and predictable than other waste, such as household waste.

Increased regulation of residual materials and socioeconomic changes, such as the introduction of ideas about sustainable development and circular economy in the 1990s and 2000s increased focus on industrial practices to recover resources as value add materials.