Now that's a good original topic for a paper! Should be fun to research and write.
It could span both micro and macroeconomics. At the micro level, you have the entrepreneur trying to maximize profit through judicious selection of materials to recycle and allocation of labor. The growth of the recycling industry in general, and the distribution of the inputs (materials mostly from developed economies and labor from both developed and developing economies), can be analyzed from the macro perspective. You could get a whole thesis out of this!
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