Posts Tagged ‘Waste’

Reduce Plastic Waste – Recycle Old CDs/DVDs

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Over the weekend I was doing a bit of video work for my theater company — compiling some work sample DVDs.  A couple of times (as sometimes happens), Toast threw an error that turned an otherwise perfectly usable DVD into a coaster.  This, over time and over a large number of users, must generate a lot of waste.

Since the idea of generating less waste has been on my mind a lot lately — especially in terms of trying to reduce my consumption of plastic — I started investigating whether CDs and DVDs were recyclable.

Turns out, yes!  There are a couple of services that will accept old CDs and DVDs (and their cases), recycle them, and send them back out into the world:

  • CD Recycling Center is a free resource that accepts CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blue-Ray discs and CD cases for free (!!!) all you have to pay for is postage.
  • EcoDisc does the same

There are probably more out there — these were just the easiest ones to find on Google.  It’s also possible your city’s recycling program accepts these items along with your plastic recycling.

This is all good news, no?  Yes, it takes a little bit of effort, but not too much.  And it seems worthwhile to not unnecessarily contribute any more plastic to our landfills or the accumulation of plastic in our ocean’s gyres (why the latter doesn’t show up in the news more often is completely baffling to me).

If there were any justice in the world, AOL would foot any bills generated by recycling CDs and DVDs.  I would love to see a figure on what percentage of CDs in our landfills came from them…