I have always found it interesting that the enviros push "recycle" the most from their mantra of "reduce, reuse, recycle". They actually have that in the right order regarding effective conservation of resources, but recycling gets all the advertising. Personally, I think it goes back to my Prius Owner theory that things like recycling are more "showy" of someone "doing something" so it's more popular than the other two.
I don't have the engineering background to give an expert opinion, but common sense seems to indicate to me that recycling things like certain paper, batteries, and some metals (like cash for clunkers cars) is going to create at least as much pollution and hazardous byproducts (maybe more) as producing them from scratch.