Why can't council recycling centers actually recycle CDs and DVDs properly?

Posted by Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 53 comments

took a load of cds to my local recycling center, the oddball working there was furious i'd seperated them, making them 'unsellable', i'd removed the cases/cardboard sleaves, so each bitcould be recycled properly... apartvfrom the cds which sadly go with the household waste. he seemed to think all cds and dvds had to go in a massive bucket for the charity shops, which also gets picked through by the bric-a-brac men passing by. now, if i thought my cds of 90s crap punk bands were worth reselling i'd happily give them to charity, but i see cds and dvds as legacy media and the sooner chariry shops stop selling them the better, i mean who honestly goes 'oohhh Mrs Brown's Boys DVD season 2,ohhh thank you very much...'? i'd rather they work out a way to recycle the disc, melt it down or dip it in a solvent etc, so our beloved CD can be reused.

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53 Comments

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365BlobbyGirl@reddit

Why can't you dispose of your CDs a DVDs correctly?

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

i do. i go to the tip and i seperate the hard plastics and carsboard and the cd goes in the general waste. its a shane we cant do something with the cd though

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EdmundTheInsulter@reddit

What on earth could be done with it? It's a mixture of stuff is it not?

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mdzmdz@reddit

Back in 2005-2015 kind of time when you would literally get CDs with cornflakes the IT department I worked at used to send crates of useless CDs off to a recycling service. My limited understanding of the process was that they removed the top/bottom layers with a razor blade and then the disc went through a more standard plastic process. I couldn't say if this was economical or indeed environmental but it did 'feel' better than just putting them in the bin.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

i actually met someone in another country who was an engineer and they looking at uses for cds like grinding them up into a powder and finding some sort of industrial use for it.

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EdmundTheInsulter@reddit

It's all green washing, it must be minute compared to all other plastics and look at all the plastic in one car that lasts 10 years.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

yeah i tried suggesting they sell the powder at fairs for crsyal healing and alternative medicine. that went woosh over his head

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Super_Ground9690@reddit

Bit unnecessary to call the guy an oddball, I would assume with him working there he knows more about the process than you. Just because you don’t think anyone should be buying CDs any more doesn’t mean everyone thinks the same. My 21yo niece and her friends actually go out of their way to buy CDs, they view them as cool & retro and all have CD players. And if you had Mrs Brown’s Boys on DVD well, that’s on you for buying such dross in the first place.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

i spent ages sorting out the cardboard sleaves and the cases into hard plastic, and this bloke was like a genuine oddball. he could have kept him opinions to himself!

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username_not_clear@reddit

His "opinions" are likely his employers policies on which he was trained. Poor fellas probably going home to tell his Mrs about the numpty who knew best about separating DVDs and their cases, forcing them to be recycled rather than reused.

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sihasihasi@reddit

>cardboard sleaves FFS. *Sleeves

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

its a double ee? you is shiting me!

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EdmundTheInsulter@reddit

Are they interested in my old 78's?

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tmstms@reddit

I know you jest, but the serious answer is that 78s are now out of copyright, so historical recordings get transferred to digital media and have been issued on CDs (and now obviosuly in terms of pure digitally) for some years.

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EleganceOfTheDesert@reddit

Just because you've stopped caring about physical media, doesn't mean the rest of us have. There's enough e-waste out there without you adding to it.

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EdmundTheInsulter@reddit

Scan them and send to music magpie, but it's too late now. he can't recycle useless plastic

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

meh, we need less crap in the world!

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wordsfromlee@reddit

So instead of giving them a new home, you just add them landfill! Solid logic.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

no one wants stratches cds that probably have me pubes stuck in them

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sihasihasi@reddit

It's very rare that hard plastics are routinely recycled at the tip, and the discs themselves can't be. So, it's just the paper, which is a tiny part of it, which may be recycled. So, I'm with the guy at the tip, here.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

our tip does hard plastics.

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terryjuicelawson@reddit

> if i thought my cds of 90s crap punk bands were worth reselling i'd happily give them to charity You'd be surprised, people do buy CDs. May only be 50p a pop or something, very few are rare in the same way vinyl can be valuable, but collectable. The quality is there you see, and people want something physical rather than stream it all.

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tmstms@reddit

Why was the council person not correct? If you go in a charity shop, they always have tons of CDs and DVDs. They may be legacy media, but people still consume them. I had a batch of CDs manufactured last year, and they have sold enough to go into profit, and almost certainly will in fact sell out (Mrs tmstms and I disagreed on how many should be pressed and she went for a smaller number). My car has a CD player. For me, it is less hassle occasionally to buy a CD from a charity shop than to fiddle with the bluetooth and put music on my phone. Just because YOU want your CDs and DVDs melted down does not mean everyone thinks the same.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

ohh er missus!

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Mobile_Delivery1265@reddit

Imagine reacting this way to rightly being called out for being a bit of a tit.

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mrhippoj@reddit

CDs and to a lesser extent DVDs are actually making a bit of a comeback because people are starting to get sick of streaming services. Young people in particular are learning the joy of CDs and vinyl, my partner's daughter has a CD player and her son has a record player

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Opening-Abrocoma4210@reddit

Yeah I still have a giant stack of dvds and will occasionally buy a new movie I really like. Fully accept it’s not the norm but I like having them

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mrhippoj@reddit

Same! I've had a purge recently and still feel like I barely scratched the surface, explaining to my partner that yes, I do still need a copy of Terminator: Genisys

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RichardTauber@reddit

There is no realistic method of recycling the acrylic material in these. He was just having a strop. You are right, they are worthless (more's the pity).

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tmstms@reddit

How you can say that? You yourself (I remember!) like the kind of music that is still very well packaged on CDs. They are kind of financially worthless (unless new releases), but they still can give a lot of pleasure to people.

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DaveBeBad@reddit

My collection of old vinyl and cds is worth between £5k and £30k according to Discogs. Between £3 and £18 each on average. And a load of 90s punk CDs would probably have doll led on eBay for a few pounds.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

if they really want to listen, off to youtube they can go.

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tmstms@reddit

I think your bad experience with the man at the dump is causing you to write polemically.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

surely we could shred them and glue them to walls to stop naughty children retrieving footballs?

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RichardTauber@reddit

Good idea.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

or our underfunded prisons? i imagine a scene two terrible criminals with plasters on their hands saying 'ouch, Gary, we wuz so close to freedom but that 7ft (sorry i mean 190cm) wall with broken cds on top really hurt my fingers, i learnt me lesson!' then they sprnd the next 20 years dreaming of oven gloves

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knightsbridge-@reddit

It's about money. Paper, wood, glass and metal recycle for a (small) profit. There are plenty of companies that buy recycled glass, metal and pulp materials, and the tip can make money off recycling them. It's a genuinely good, profitable and healthy industry. Recycling plastic is shite. There are a ton of different types of plastic that can't be mixed together, so you need a ton of different facilities to process the different kinds, it costs far more money and time, and is an unpleasant process overall. The market for the resulting material is also really small, and there's far more recycled plastic than the market can actually use, so it sells for basically no money. A charity shop might buy a job lot of CDs for a few pennies, and that's more profit for the tip than recycling the CDs would be. The fact that the CDs might then sit in a charity shop warehouse for a few years without being sold is nobody's problem except the charity shop. ... Except, the charity shops won't take them if they don't have the case, cover, etc.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

there was a charity shop around here which crated up boxes of cds to sell to a recycler but it seemed they wouldnt accept random cds just unsold donations. and that shop aint around no more

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Symbolic37@reddit

Reuse is far better than recycling. Give them to a charity shop, they might not sell them but they can always recycle them if not.

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ledow@reddit

They can't recycle them. That's the point. They'll landfill them if not, same as anyone else can (and what everyone does if something is refused at the recycling centre anyway).

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

if they are land fill surely we can lay them out to make a funny picture like Art Attack, to impress a future alien civilization?

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ledow@reddit

Microwave them all for kicks.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

the classic!

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Swimming_Possible_68@reddit

The plastics that both the cd and the jewel case are hard to recycle, likely with very little value.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

jewel case? til!

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Opening-Abrocoma4210@reddit

I just gave a bunch of dvds to the charity shop round the corner from me the other week, and the girl specifically asked if I had more cos ‘we sell loads of these believe it or not’. So yes, someone might well be going ‘dvds ooooh’.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

yeah but the people who buy them may not need them?

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tmstms@reddit

No-one NEEDS entertainment, but they might feel their life is better for being entertained.

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

isnt reddit enough for them?

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Opening-Abrocoma4210@reddit

I don’t understand the point you’re making here

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Virtual-Guitar-9814@reddit (OP)

well, y'know!

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warriorscot@reddit

Lots of people still use CDs and DVDs and how is it for you to judge who should or should not sell or buy them, pretty oddball opinion of your own frankly. There's lots of people still using DVD and CD isn't legacy, it's a totally normal and still the only reliable digital way to get lossless audio other than a pair of relatively limited online services. If you want physical media you literally either have to pirate it or get CDs or vinyl. There's also a big market still for them overseas, so anything of value and often what the bric a brac types are doing will go there if they think someone will buy it. Otherwise someone else will go in and do that. So basically they were annoyed you didn't follow the system and you wasted your own time because nobody asked you yo separate out your CDs from the packaging.

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