Things degrade and wear out at different rates. The clock starts at zero when something is new, but when something breaks, the "mean time to failure" is all over the place for the components. At a certain point, you don't really own something old; instead, you're paying rent in the form of repairs. The intermittent availability starts to become stressful; you're never sure when the next thing will break or need repair, you can no longer rely on the thing.
IMO the whole recycling religion is an historical blip. There's no long term need to focus on repairable, recyclable products; nor any need to separate out rubbish types etc. This is a resource allocation problem, and with legislation to embed the cost of dismantling and separation in the cost of something, I think it'll disappear.