Make The Most of Your CDs
Contrary to popular belief unwanted CDs and DVDs are 100% recyclable and in some cases reusable.
The reflective surface of the CD/DVD means that it can be used artistically by arts and craft businesses to create attractive hand-made cards, calendars and coasters or for more practical purposes like bird scarers.
One such company is CD Business Promotions| which is based in Cwmbran. According to the founder Gwyneth Little, her hand-made CD calendars, coasters and cards "come in 5 different drilled designs decorated with your choice of coloured silks and centres".
Her customers currently include individuals who purchase them for their personal use or as gifts but she feels that they have the potential to be used by businesses as promotional gifts.
More information on this can be found on her website.
According to Waste Connect| there are ways that you can easily reduce and re-use the number of CDs/DVDs that you use. This includes:
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Choose rewritable CDs and writable and rewritable DVDs (CD-RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW) to save your documents, images and multimedia files to.
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Try to repair scratched discs by using a mild abrasive - like toothpaste - on them.
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Give your unwanted usable CDs to friends or family.
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Send your unusable CDS/DVDs to companies who recycle them.
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Donate pre-recorded music CDs to charity shops for resale.
Recycled waste that would otherwise go to landfill can be reduced and provide useful raw materials for new product manufacture. According to the Daily Mirror|, more than a million Robbie Williams' "...Rudebox CDs will be crushed and then used in street lighting and road projects". They went on to say that "Emi is launching the recycling scheme in a bid to cut costs after losing £263million in 2007. Recycled CDs have even been used to create solar concentrators which boost solar panel and solar furnace output in rural New Mexico. One concentrator requires 300 CDs. However, recycling CDs is not as simple as breaking CDs or DVDs into a million pieces.
According to one UK company - Polymer Reprocessors Ltd| - this is how its done:
Step 1
Once received by PRL, the CDs are sent to two local prisons where the CDs are separated from cases and physically damaged, therefore rendering them unsuitable for black market sales.
Step 2
Paper waste is baled and pulped to be sold on to produce cardboard.
Step 3
All other materials are returned to the PRL plant in Knowsley.
Step 4
The jewel case is granulated and fed into an extrusion system, fitted with laser filters for
contaminant removal.
Step 5
This produces a crystal polystyrene pellet, which can be used for the manufacture of new CD jewel cases, artificial wood and packaging and insulating foam.
Step 6
The discs are stripped of paint, aluminium and data and reused as a filler in industry.
Step 7
The resultant disc is then granulated and compounded into injection grade quality polycarbonate. This can then be used to produce burglar alarm boxes, street lighting lenses, PIR’s and motor vehicle reflectors.