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Time for some spring cleaning?
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When we set out to develop this week’s Green Report, we really had no idea if, or how, DVDs could be recycled. Common sense suggested there must be a way, and I was hoping against hope that we would find you can just throw them into curbside recycling with all the other 1-7 plastics. But some industry execs I assumed would be in a position to know insisted they had researched it, and DVDs just were not recyclable. (Guess we should have asked Fox.) |
Of course, those execs turned out to be wrong, and my hopes of being able to just dump the discs in the blue bin were dashed as well. The good news is that DVDs (and other optical discs) are recyclable, but you have to do a little more than toss them away with the weekend’s soda bottles.
Several companies recycle and, in some cases, may reuse unwanted DVDs, and they want your trash.
Damage and production errors may create some of the hundreds of millions of DVDs, CDs and game discs that are discarded each year, according to David Beschen of recycler GreenDisk. But, he says the majority of unwanted discs currently come from retailers who have intentionally overstocked so as to be able to guarantee their customers’ first choice of new releases.
Recyclers suspect there’s an even larger, if mostly untapped, source of unwanted discs, however—in consumers’ homes.
A store recycling program can do more than dispose of your unwanted inventory in an environmentally safe and guilt-free way; it can also work as a point of differentiation from your competition and a value to your customer.
Invite customers to bring in old, scratched or simply unwanted discs and their cases that you will recycle for them. You may also be able to collect batteries, old cell phones and other “technotrash” that consumers don’t know what to do with.
(I know I’ve got a growing box of it in the closet, just waiting to some day be ferried with old cans of paint, solvent and other toxic stuff to the city hazardous waste collection center.)
Posted by Marcy Magiera on February 1, 2008 | Comments (0)