recycle

Recycle means to turn old things into new ones so they don't get thrown away.

When we think about recycling, we usually mean taking used materials like paper, plastic bottles, or glass and turning them into something else. For example, you might bring your empty plastic water bottle to a special machine that crushes it into small pieces which can then be made into new things like playground equipment or even more plastic bottles. We do this to help keep the Earth clean by not wasting resources and reducing how much trash we send to landfills.

Also worth noting: in English, "recycle" can sometimes mean to reuse an idea or concept, especially in school work. For instance, if a student is asked to come up with new ways to solve a problem and one of their ideas is just a variation on something they've done before, we might say that they're recycling the same old idea.