While I agree with what you write, I am missing the sociological part. I mean, you can't retrieve anything back from waste unless you had some success researchi

While I agree with what you write, I am missing the sociological part. I mean, you can't retrieve anything back from waste unless you had some success researching some procedure to do so (and sometimes research 'fails'). But funding for such research isn't as cheap as one player alone could pay for it. So you might want to install some taxes and a government in order to manage your finances. That would be even more educating but might stop being fun, as players would most certainly not agree on what to spend their money on. But on the other hand, if you would just offer the technology to extract valuable materials from waste at a cheap supermarket price you would just shift the realism gap to another part by giving them an easy solution to their problem.