Environmental legislation for the process and manufacturing industries is frequently formulated without considering the fundamental limits of physics, chemistry and thermodynamics within process technology. Recycling of end-of-life goods is used in this paper to show how the limits can be evaluated on the basis of the theory of minerals processing and metallurgical engineering. This theory has been applied on European Union level to re-examine the legislation for automobile recycling in a recent stakeholder discussion involving the automotive industry (http://www.assurre.org). This theory and our models are finding their way into the computer aided design (CAD) tools of the automotive industry, developments that form part of a project to design the super light car of the future (http://www.superlightcar.com). Only such fundamental approaches will in future be able to provide the basis to argue and define realistic and sensible environmental legislation._x000D_
FORMAL CITATION:Reuter, M A, van Schaik, A and Ignatenko, O, 2006. Fundamental limits for recycling - formulating environmental legislation on the basis of first principles, in Proceedings Green Processing 2006, pp 31-40 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).