Low Impact

Canberra has a great recycling setup - once a fortnight they collect the recycling bin that can take a pretty wide range of materials. But I wasn’t sure what to do with my growing collection of useless CDs.

I’m not alone in this - the web abounds with people proposing various ways of re-using old CDs as people find their collection of CDs from magazine covers, newspapers, misburnt personal CDs, old music, etc growing and growing. Some of these ideas are pretty neat - and re-use is always better than recycling - but I have a lot of old CDs!

So I sent an email off to my local government asking if I could put CDs in my recycle bin. Within 24 hours they’d responded. Unfortunately, no, local facilities couldn’t handle them (with a good technical explanation of why), and links to some other facilities that might be relevant.

A quick aside here to congratulate the ACT NOWaste program - emails to government can go unanswered for weeks before an off-topic, form-letter reply is sent. It was great to get such a quick response that was so helpful.

Their response suggested the following two facilities:

• CD ROM Services - they have a CD destruction service which includes recycling. Apparently they are currently without a recycler (having lost their previous one), but undertake to store the destroyed CDs until a new recycler is found). The website details the facility and the costs.
• Australian Plastics Reprocessing also offer a service - they prefer commercial quantities, but apparently accept smaller amounts. The link provided is to a NSW government web page discussing various recycling providers

I haven’t tried either of these services yet, but hopefully its a good starting to point for people looking into CD recycling in the region.

Categories: environment, green, recycle

Tags: cd, recycle