In the digital age, many have turned to the internet for their music consumption. The increase in the use of streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube has made music listening infinitely more convenient, and perhaps more importantly, less expensive!
In fact, think about your own music listening. How often do you actually spin a record on the record player, slide a CD into a car stereo, or pop a cassette into a cassette player? More likely than not, the answer is “not recently,” as playing music digitally is far easier than using physical forms of the same albums.
Old CDs can be recycled. Separate the paper inserts from the case and recycle them separately. For the CD itself, you’ll need to contact your local recycling center to make sure that they will accept them before you drop them off or put them in the curbside recycling bin.
So the question remains then, what can you do with all that physical music you collected over the years? Well, as far as vinyl and cassettes go, they can be placed in collections or sold to collectors.
However, CDs are a lot more common, so they are not as easily sold off and they are not worth very much in a collection. It might be best to just get rid of them. The question is: what is the best way to do it?
Can CDs Be Recycled?
The short answer to this question is yes. You should not throw away your CDs in the normal garbage! It is approximated it would take a CD in a landfill a full one million years to decompose! Talk about a long time!
It’s probably safe to assume this wouldn’t be best for the environment. So recycling CDs is probably the best way forward for getting rid of the giant stack of discs cluttering your house.
However, recycling a CD isn’t as easy as you might think! You can’t usually just chuck it in the recycling bin and toss it out on the curb.
Sometimes further steps have to be taken to make sure your CD doesn’t end up in the landfill and ends up in a recycling center or in someone else’s hands instead. So what can you do to minimize the effect your old CDs will have on the environment?
How To Recycle CDs
Well, there are a number of ways that a CD can be effectively recycled. These can include recycling as you might know it, by sending it through the proper mediums to a recycling plant of some kind to have its materials deconstructed and repurposed for other uses.
Go online and check if your town or city accepts CDs in the recycling! If they do, that’s fantastic, as it is a simple and easy way to get rid of them without harming the environment. However, if they don’t, that’s okay too. Read on for some environment-friendly CD disposal alternatives.
There are other ways that things like CDs can be reused.
Sell Them
There is still a desire for music CDs in many areas and there are some stores that specialize in buying and selling old music CDs. Don’t expect to get a lot for them, but something is better than nothing and it’ll keep them in circulation rather than sitting in a landfill somewhere.
Curbside Pickup
In most cases, CDs can’t be recycled via regular curbside pickup. Sometimes they can, so check before going through the extra effort of doing some of the steps below. However, the cases for the CDs sometimes can if they’re made of No. 6 plastic, and the paper linings of the CDs can almost always be recycled via regular curbside pickup.
Separate these different components, find out what can be recycled where, and get each to where it’s supposed to be!
Drop off Centers
In a lot of cases, if you can’t do the normal curbside pickup for your recycled goods, they can still be recycled if dropped off directly at a recycling center. This is a very simple and low effort solution to the problem, as you can simply drive over your boxes of CDs and place them right in the bin.
Check with the center before bringing in your CDs, as some don’t accept them. If they do accept them, take them out of the cases beforehand, as the different parts of the CD have different recycling requirements.
Mail-in
In the event that you can not recycle your CD via curbside pickup and there is no drop-off center local to you that accepts CDs as a recyclable material, you can always resort to using a mail-in recycling program.
There are a number of organizations, such as GreenDisk or the CD Recycling Center of America, that specialize in the recycling of old CDs. Mail your CDs to these organizations and they will handle having them properly recycled and avoid putting them into landfills for you.
Donations/Thrift Stores
If you do not want to go through the Mail-in route, there are other ways that your CDs can be disposed of. If there is no easy way to recycle them, perhaps they can be reused! Donating them to a thrift store or giving them away online can be an ethical way to rid yourself of the CDs.
Even better, someone else will get to enjoy them as much as you did now! This is a very easy way to get rid of old CDs and allows them to continue spreading music around your city or town!
Conclusion
There are many ways to recycle or reuse your old CDs. They may seem like garbage to you in the new age of internet-based music listening, but remember that they still have an impact! Be sure to dispose of them properly if you want to get rid of them by making sure they don’t end up in landfills.
Whether you go through the proper steps of recycling them (not just throwing them on the curb, as this will most likely land them in landfills as well) or allow them to be reused by someone else, it is important to be environmentally conscious when getting rid of your old CDs! Everyone has a lot of them, so do your part and get those CDs recycled today!
