Recycling an item in your inventory converts it to XM, which is then added to your reserves. The original item is destroyed, freeing up space in your inventory.

How to Recycle

Open your inventory and find the item you wish to recycle. Tap the “+” and “-” buttons as needed to select how many of that item to recycle. The XM you will receive is displayed at the bottom-right. The color of this display indicates how much room you have for the additional XM: yellow means plenty of room, purple means you’ll be almost full after the recycle, and red means the recycle will produce more XM than you have room for in your reserves.

Once you’ve selected the number of items you wish to recycle, tap the “Recycle” button to convert the items to XM.

To select all items in a category of a particular level or rarity, select that category of object, then tap the multiselect button located below the carousel on the right. A display will appear showing all items you hold at each level or rarity; tap the ones you wish to bulk recycle to select them, then tap “Recycle.”

Recycling a capsule will award XM for the capsule and all the items inside it. Note that any XM you receive that exceeds your scanner’s XM capacity is lost.

Premium items (those which must be purchased from the store) cannot be recycled.

Strategy

The two principal reasons to recycle items are: 1) to free up space in your inventory, or 2) gain XM.

If you have a variety of different items you don’t want, you can load them into a capsule. Recycling that capsule will recycle all the items in it, turning it into sort of a ghetto power cube.

Recycle Values

Different types of items yield different amounts of XM when recycled. The table below shows how much XM you get for recycling an item (higher rows take priority over lower ones):

Description Recycle Value
Hypercube* 160 XM
Power Cube 1,000 XM per level
Portal Key 500 XM
Leveled items 20 XM per level
Very Rare item 100 XM
Rare item 80 XM
Common item 40 XM
Very Common item 20 XM

* Note: A hypercube can only be recycled by putting it in a capsule and recycling the capsule.

History

  • 25 April 2013: Recycling is introduced.
  • 13 June 2013: The recycling dialog is overhauled.
  • 18 June 2014: Bulk recycling becomes available. (Before this, agents were obliged to recycle items one at a time.)
  • 9 December 2015: The XM value of recycled keys increases from 20 XM to 500 XM.
  • 19 February 2016: Recycling a power cube now gives the same amount of XM as using it. (Before, it only gave 20 XM per level. Accidentally recycling a power cube used to be downright tragic!)
  • 5 November 2018: The Ingress Prime release introduces a new inventory management system and bulk recycling of items.