[coldtea]

>In my experience, products advertising "made using recycled materials" tend to be more expensive than without

That's not necessarily because of their higher cost to produce. It's often because they target higher end "environmentally conscious" customers, and use the "made with recycled materials" as a price differentiation / market segmentation strategy (working class Joe? get our $1 notebook. Latte-sipping hipster? Here's our $5 recycled notebook)...

[barrkel]

You'd still expect recycled material to be used in preference to virgin materials for cheap products, if recycled material is actually more efficient.

[coldtea]

And it happens all the time. But no need to brand it especially, and kill the lucrative recycled lines by associating recycled with el-cheapo...

[C4stor]

This doesn't forbid using recycled materials for cheaps products, you just don't advertise it.

[tomstoms]

In an economic system, a product will be sold at the highest price possible, so if advertising it as using recycled materials nets you higher profit, than you will do that. So even if non-recycled is more expensive to produce, it will be cheaper if people are not willing to pay as much for it.

[C4stor]

There a lot of cases of the exact same product being sold at different price tags under different names/brands.

In an economic system, a product tries to be sold at the highest price possible _for each potential buyer_, not as a whole.

[tomstoms]

I should have added “all else being equal”. In context of the question I was trying to answer this still holds.