CD recycling efforts strong at area schools

Christa Desrets / Lynchburg News & Advance
Published: January 12, 2008

What started as an easy way for students at Sweet Briar College to help the environment has caught on at another area school and now is being opened up to the community.

Recycling CDs and DVDs instead of throwing them away helps the environment, SBC's Academic Technology Trainer and Consultant Tom Marcais said, because the plastic and metals that make up a CD don't easily decompose.

So when he heard of the New Hampshire-based CD Recycling Center of America, the first of its kind that opened last April, Marcais thought it would be an easy way for students and

faculty to contribute.

"In just one semester, we've collected almost 600 CDs and DVDs," he said.

Mostly, the discs were outdated software CDs, unwanted burned CDRs and free sample discs sent through the mail. Plastic CD cases also were

collected.

Angela White, a fourth-grade teacher at James River Day School, heard about the program from her husband, a professor at Sweet Briar, and spread the word to her own

students.

The fourth-graders created posters to hang around the school and asked classmates to place their unwanted discs into collection boxes, which also were decorated by students.

"It's so nice to know where to put your trash so you can send it and it won't end up in a landfill," White said. "So far, we've collected about 60 discs, so we're just getting started."

The school gives its collected discs to Sweet Briar, which scratches the discs so they're unreadable and ships them to the CD Recycling Center.

The center focuses on recycling polycarbonate, which is a high grade of plastic that CDs and DVDs are made from, according to Bruce Bennett, founder of the CD Recycling Center.

"When we cleanly collect and sort these, we are able to have them recycled into a higher grade of plastic which can be used for more industries and products," Bennett said in an e-mail. "It keeps discs out of the trash that won't decompose in a landfill, and it also keeps discs from getting burned in an incinerator, which emits gases into the atmosphere."

The recycled plastic is used to make products for the automotive and home building industries, he said, which cuts down on the need to mine more natural resources to make the products.

Sweet Briar and the James River Day School are the only two participants in Central Virginia, according to the center's Web site.

Marcais wants to grow the project locally by asking anyone with unwanted discs to bring them to collection boxes at Sweet Briar's library and post office.

He also suggests that people can cut back on their use of CDs by using DVDs, which have more storage capacity, rewritable CDs or flash drives.

White said she hopes the idea catches on.

"It's a wonderful project," she said.