It sounds unrecyclable, and unreusable.

Most material waste from a home renovation is tossed into the local dump. It is rare anything is salvaged.

Yeah, but to be fair, windows tend to be used in roles where they last a very long time.

Why would you need to recycle wood? It's biodegradable and cheap.

Recycling is overrated for cheap products. Plastic is practically impossible to recycle effectively. If it were made to be biodegradable that would make much more sense. But even failing that, there is no shortage of landfill space, as long as it goes to the garage and not to the environment - a huge problem in the developing world and where the plastic in the ocean originates from.

Wood is biodegradable. If mixed with plastic however (which this seems to be), it's not.

While it's relatively easy to recycle pure plastics for composite materials it's notoriously difficult.

This plastic, PVA, is the one used in white glue, the one that kids use in school or carpenters use to glue things together. Wikipedia [0] says it biodegrades slowly. I believe (keyword: believe and am not sure) it could be redissolved in warm water, or might even be replaced by a renewable glue like gelatin.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_alcohol

Not sure you'd want a window that easily dissolves in water...

To help others parse the last paragraph, I would add a comma because clauses:

While it's relatively easy to recycle pure plastics, for composite materials it's notoriously difficult.

*between clauses I meant to say

Neither is glass, which I'd hazard lasts longer in the environment as well - although glass at least doesn't float so it can't "wander off".

Firstly, it is a natural material - its basically sand. It does as much damage to the envirobment as any random rock.

Secondly it has been recycled for decades and is actually a relatively simple material that can be molten, purigied abd re-cast, much like metals can be.

However glass is inert, whereas plastic is not

Apparently if you dump glass into the ocean, within 10 years it looks like those decorative pebbles so it's actually a pretty good way of dealing with it.

Now imagine dumping a million tons of it at a time, in a few select spots of the ocean. That’s what we did with plastics.

No.

Recycling wood products is actually quite environmentally unfriendly and produces inferior products. It really only makes sense to recycle glass.

> It really only makes sense to recycle glass.

And metals like aluminum, iron, copper, etc.