A new type of loot item has been added to the game. They are called, "Recyclers" and there are 5 types of recyclers: Flora, Creature, Metal, Chemical and Ore. Both the limited schematics (cannot be made in a factory) and pieces for the various recycling units can be looted from NPC's and assembled.

Recyclers are objects that can be used to turn resources into generic versions of themselves. For example, a recycler would make it so that you could recycle a specific type of Copper (Oho, Tatooine Copper) into just a generic stack of non-ferrous metal.  If you put an "unknown" resource into the recycler,  the recycled resource will become its default or base class resource.

Why would you do this?

Well, there are several reasons. First, since many crafting recipes call for a specific number of resources it is handy to be able to combine smaller stacks of resources that you can't use into a stack of resources that can be used in order to make something. For example, if a food recipe calls for 5 units of cereal, being able to combine a stack of 3 rice with a stack of 2 corn to make 5 cereal turns 2 small stacks of unusable resources into a generic component that you can use . By using the loot recycler, you can recycle old unused items and make them usable again.
There are 5 types of recyclers:

Chemical Recycler: Chemical Compound Device
(Handles water, radioactives, chemicals, and solid petrochemical fuels)

Creature Recycler: Organic Combiner
(Handles meat, milk, hides, bones, and horns)

Flora Recycler: Floral Mulcher / Processor
(Handles fruit, vegetables, wood, and cereal grains)

Metal Recycler: Smelting Machine
(Handles all metals, steel, copper, iron, aluminum)

Ore Recycler: Rock Tumbler
(Handles gemstones, igneous, and sedimentary rocks)

Each recycler has to be set to which type of resources it's handling currently. For example, the Flora recycler should be set to fruit in order to process fruits, and won't process vegetables while it's set to that state.

Leuk !!! keep it coming!