So many ideas involving AI just seems to be built off of sci-fi (not in a good way), including this one. Like sci-fi, there are little practical considerations made.
What? Fundamentally, information can only be so dense. Current models may be inefficient w.r.t. information density, however, there is a lower bound of compute required. As a pathological example, we shouldn't expect a megabyte worth of parameters to be able to encode the entirety of Wikipedia.
I thought recycle was the breaking down of the device into its constituents (mostly to recover precious metals or other base materials). In contrast, reuse is where the device is kept mostly intact and used for other purposes such as this. Just breaking things down requires considerable amounts of energy through the sheer logistics of it relative to just reusing it.