Most of the metal we throw away at home comes from food and drink cans and aerosols. Typically food cans are made from steel, which can be melted down and turned into new food cans. Drinks cans are generally thinner and lighter and made from aluminum, which can also be recycled very easily. Mining aluminum is a very energy-intensive and environmentally harmful process. That's why waste aluminum cans have a relatively high value and why recycling them is such a good thing to do.
One problem with recycling paper is that not all paper is the <em>same</em>. White office printer paper is made of much higher quality raw material than the paper towels you'll find in a factory washroom. The higher the quality of paper waste, the better the quality of recycled products it can be used to make. So high-grade white paper collected from offices can be used to make more high-grade white recycled paper. But a mixture of old newspapers, office paper, junk mail, and cardboard can generally be used only to make lower-grade paper products such as "newsprint" (the low-grade paper on which newspapers are printed). Corrugated cardboard (which is held together with glue) is harder to recycle than the thin cardboard used to package groceries.
In conclusion, metals are almost all the same. There are a variety of different papers, (paper towel, cardboard, etc) so it is very hard to recycle that if they are all different.
Hope this helped!
