Either way, the recycling process begins to actually take place. So the main component of the red blood cell are these hemoglobin proteins. So this describes the recycling of hemoglobin inside the macrophage. So essentially what happens is our hemoglobin consists of a heme group that contains an iron atom and it also contains of the protein component, the globin. So what happens is the globin protein component is broken down into its constituents, amino acids, and the heme group is broken down into the iron atom as well as that heme. Now, the iron and the amino acids can either remain inside the cell and be used by that cell, or they go into our blood plasma and then travel back into the bone marrow, where the bone marrow reuses these recycled materials to form more red blood cells.