I remember reading probably 20 years ago a paper published in Science that did a energy usage study on recycling. The paper's conclusion was that recycling was a energy hog!
All the reprocessing necessary to make recycled material usable as basic product feeds (e.g., recover the metal, the glass, etc) used significantly more energy then if you just made a new product and sometimes even required the introduction of new material. (So no net material savings!)
I remember my late (well wasn't late then!) mother-in-law a good FDR democrat was horrified by my statements on recycling. She was a wonderful and dear person but bought into every environmental fad hook-line-and-sinker that came down the road. I was on this issue her son-in-law the antisocial cranky curmudgeon conservative ( But who understood thermodynamics!). Who was just being that way because democrats were advocating it!
Depends upon what it is. Aluminum actually makes sense as a recylcable material because it is very energy intensive to process raw ore into aluminum, compared to the energy it takes to resmelt aluminum cans.
Paper, on the other hand, is not recycle friendly at all. It's actually more expensive to recycle paper than it is worth. The same for the most part can be said about glass, unless you're not as concerned about the appearance of the glass you produce. You can't, to the best of my knowledge, produce clear glass unless you only have clear glass fed into the stream.