The concept of recycling places the use of materials in the context of global cycles of molecular transformation. However, it is difficult to take it out of its economic, social, and ecological context and apply it to the world of art and culture, where immaterial ideas are sometimes said to be recycled. This chapter explores some of the intellectual histories connected with recycling and criticizes the narrow framing of utilitarian political narratives in the last few hundred years in Europe—those in which the global influence of Eurocentric narratives of improvement and progress have produced the damage of the Anthropocene imbalance. An Asian terminology that conceptually maps human blood circulation and ecological cycles is interesting not only because of the implied balance between venous and arterial industries but also poetologically as a case of metaphor recycling. Considering the economy of recycling also throws light on the historical and global shifts of balance in the mixes of personnel, material, transportation, and marketing costs and raises questions about the values of knowledge, entertainment, and their fusion in the term Erkenntnis or insight as a unit of work and use value in art.