This mod makes recyclers always output items with normal quality, regardless of what quality the input items were.

Should be fine to add to an existing game, even if you've already built recyclers.

If you encounter any bugs, report them in the discussion tab.

Gameplay implications: You can only boost quality when going forwards in the production chain. You can still do recycling loops, but only with normal-quality items, so you'll rather want to boost quality at every step of the production chain, instead of boosting quality at the end with a recycler loop.

How is it implemented? When you place a recycler, the mod creates an invisible furnace inside the recycler. Then when you put an item such as a battery into the recycler, the recycler turns it into 1 unit of "battery recycling fluid". Since it's a fluid, it has no quality. This "fluid" then goes into the invisible "furnace", which converts it into the normal products of battery recycling (iron and copper plates). The advantage of this approach is that the mod doesn't need to run code every tick or every time a recipe finishes, which would be slow. Instead it only uses the game's built-in entities and recipes, so all the work is done by the game engine (fast) instead of runtime mod code (slow).

Intuitive justification:

• Imagine that you work carefully (with quality modules) to paint a high-quality painting, using normal-quality paints and canvas. The quality of the resulting painting is a property of how the paint and canvas were put together, not something put into the paint and canvas themselves. Trying to pull the paint off the canvas won't produce high-quality paint and canvas.
• Or, instead of trying to get high quality by painting carefully (quality modules), you could use high-quality ingredients, which will probably make your painting better. But again, if you then try to remove the paint from the canvas, you will ruin the quality of those ingredients.