Recycling
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144 free Recycling trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free recycling trivia questions with answers. Think you're an recycling expert? Put your environmental knowledge to the test with our comprehensive 144-question recycling trivia quiz! From plastic waste management to sustainable practices, this quiz covers everything you need to know about recycling and protecting our planet. Whether you're an eco-conscious individual or just curious about waste management, challenge yourself and discover how much you really know about recycling.
30 of 144 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which furnace makes new steel mainly by melting scrap instead of smelting ore?
Electric arc furnace
Electric arc furnace: it melts scrap with an electric arc instead of smelting ore in a blast furnace, which helps make steel one of the world's most recycled materials.
Q 02What term describes converting waste into new materials of lesser quality than the original?
Downcycling
Downcycling: in a 1994 interview Reiner Pilz complained that demolition crews smashed old bricks into rubble and called it recycling. 'I call it downcycling,' he said.
Q 03What is a recycling system called where paper, plastics, metals and containers all go in one collection bin?
Single-stream recycling
Single-stream recycling puts everything in one bin and leaves the sorting to machines later; more households take part, but more of what they put out arrives too dirty to sell.
Q 04What policy makes manufacturers pay for collecting and recycling their own goods once customers discard them?
Extended Producer Responsibility
Extended Producer Responsibility moves the cost of dealing with worn-out goods from town halls to the firms that made them, which gives those firms a reason to design products that are easier to recycle.
Q 05A notebook labelled '100% post-consumer recycled' is made from which source of paper?
Used household paper
Used household paper: 'post-consumer' means the paper has already served a customer. Mill offcuts routinely go straight back into the pulp, so they are often not counted as recycled content at all.
Q 06William McDonough, co-author of the 2002 design manifesto Cradle to Cradle, works in which profession?
Architecture
Architecture: McDonough wrote the book with the German chemist Michael Braungart, and they had it printed on pages made from plastic resin instead of paper, so that the book itself could be recycled.
Q 07What is the main danger when a lithium-ion battery is crushed in a bin lorry or at a sorting plant?
Fire
Fire: a crushed cell short-circuits and can burn fiercely, which is why recyclers drain large packs or shred them under inert gas, and why loose batteries should never go in a household bin.
Q 08Paper cannot be recycled for ever because each trip through the pulp mill does what to its fibres?
Shortens them
Shortens them: the US Environmental Protection Agency puts the limit at five to seven rounds, after which the fibres are too short to bond into a new sheet.
Q 09Which of these materials can be recycled again and again without any loss of quality?
Glass
Glass melts back into the same glass every time. The catch is colour, which survives the furnace, so clear, brown and green bottles have to be collected separately.
Q 10Recycling which material saves about 95% of the energy needed to make it from scratch?
Aluminium
Aluminium: smelting it from ore devours electricity, but remelting old metal needs only about 5% as much, which is why roughly three-quarters of all the aluminium ever made is still in use.
Q 11Which paper item is rarely recycled because of its thin plastic lining?
Coffee cups
Coffee cups: the plastic lining is hard to separate from the paper, and British MPs reported in 2018 that fewer than one in 400 of the 2.5 billion cups used there each year was recycled.
Q 12HDPE, the plastic stamped with resin code 2, usually makes which household item?
Milk jugs
Milk jugs: HDPE is stiff and strong for its weight and shrugs off most solvents, which is why the same plastic is trusted with bleach and detergent.
Q 13Before an old fridge is shredded, recyclers must first capture what?
Its coolant gases
Its coolant gases: older fridges used CFCs that eat the ozone layer, and their replacements are powerful greenhouse gases, so the law requires them to be drawn off before the fridge is broken up.
Q 21Which plastic, recycling code 6, is used for disposable cups and foam packaging?
Polystyrene (PS)
Polystyrene (PS) foam is about 95% air, so a lorry-load of it holds very little plastic, and very few kerbside schemes think it worth collecting.
Q 22Which code-7 plastic, used in CDs and older baby bottles, is made from bisphenol A?
Polycarbonate
Polycarbonate is made from bisphenol A (BPA), and once BPA was found to leach out, the US, Canada and the EU banned it from baby bottles; CDs and DVDs are moulded from the same clear, tough plastic.
Q 23What nickname is given to the tiny pre-production plastic pellets that often wash up on beaches?
Nurdles
Q 14Carmen Hijosa's leather substitute, used in shoes and handbags, is made from the waste leaves of which fruit?
Pineapple
Pineapple: Hijosa took the idea from the Philippines, where the leaf fibre is woven into traditional shirts, and the leaves left after each harvest would otherwise be burned or left to rot.
Q 15What recycling method heats plastic waste without oxygen to break it into oil, gas and char?
Pyrolysis
Pyrolysis: with no oxygen present the plastic cannot burn, so the heat instead breaks its long molecules into oil, gas and char that can be refined into fuels and chemical feedstocks.
Q 16Shredded old tyres are widely recycled as the springy infill of which sports surface?
Artificial turf pitches
Artificial turf pitches: the rubber crumb is worked in between the plastic fibres to cushion the surface, whereas early AstroTurf was little more than a short-pile carpet.
Q 17What was the WWII practice of households handing in metal, paper and rubber usually called?
Salvage
Salvage: America's 'Salvage for Victory' drives even collected kitchen fat, because the glycerine extracted from it went into explosives; Britain ran a National Salvage Campaign of its own.
Q 18Which plastic, recycling code #3, is used in pipes and window frames but rarely recycled curbside?
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) is also the vinyl of records. Sorters keep it apart because its chlorine gives off an acid gas when it is melted with other plastics, which ruins the batch.
Q 19Food trays of which colour are often rejected for recycling because sorting machines cannot detect them?
Black
Black: the carbon-black pigment hides the tray from the plant's sorting machines, so it ends up among the rejects; makers have responded with black pigments the machines can detect.
Q 20Which heat-resistant plastic, resin code 5, is used for microwavable containers and bottle caps?
Polypropylene (PP)
Polypropylene (PP) does not melt until about 160 °C, so it survives the microwave and even the steam sterilisers that hospitals use, which is why laboratory and medical plasticware is made of it.
Nurdles are the small pellets that factories melt down to make plastic goods; when the cargo ship X-Press Pearl sank off Sri Lanka in 2021, billions of them washed onto the island's beaches.
Q 24What happens at a materials recovery facility, known in the trade as a 'murf'?
Mixed recyclables are sorted
Mixed recyclables are sorted there: screens, magnets and scanners split the paper, metal and plastic, which are then baled and sold to manufacturers as raw material.
Q 25Nearly all of which metal in old car batteries is recovered and cast into new ones?
Lead
Lead: old car batteries are America's most recycled consumer product, with 98% or more collected, and smelters have recast their metal into new batteries in a closed loop for about a century.
Q 26Used cooking oil is most commonly recycled into which fuel?
Biodiesel
Biodiesel: reacting used cooking oil with methanol turns its thick fats into light methyl esters, which are thin enough to burn in an ordinary diesel engine.
Q 27Which kind of household light bulb contains mercury and so has to be handed in separately?
Fluorescent
Fluorescent: the mercury vapour inside escapes when the glass breaks in a bin or dumpster, so many governments ban these bulbs from household rubbish and stores collect them for recycling.
Q 28Plastic fragments smaller than five millimetres across are classed under what name?
Microplastics
Microplastics: sunlight and waves grind floating litter into ever smaller pieces, and the fragments have since turned up in sea salt, seafood and drinking water.
Q 29In the European Union's waste hierarchy, which option sits at the top as the most preferred?
Prevention
Prevention tops the hierarchy because waste that is never made needs no collecting, sorting or processing; reuse, recycling and energy recovery follow in that order, with disposal last.
Q 30What does the numbered triangle stamped on plastic products actually tell you?
What the item is made of
What the item is made of, meaning its resin type: the code says nothing about whether it can be recycled, which is why a 2013 revision swapped the confusing chasing arrows for a plain triangle.