Metals, especially aluminum, are useful enough to recycle that it's sometimes worth extracting them from the municipal waste stream (this is a no-brainer if you

Metals, especially aluminum, are useful enough to recycle that it's sometimes worth extracting them from the municipal waste stream (this is a no-brainer if your waste is incinerated, rather than sent to a landfill directly). Glass, plastic, and paper are generally at best marginal for recycling, especially because they can be sensitive to contamination in the recycling process (oops, somebody threw a greasy pizza box in the recycling!). Glass and some kinds of plastic products work really well for reuse rather than recycling, but a municipal recycling stream isn't conducive to reuse; you're probably more likely to see them ground up and 'recycled' as some kind of aggregate. For plastic, I'd expect that just about only a plastic water bottle or the like is close to practicably recyclable.