The Spiraling Homestead

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

R or R VHS and Laser Disks

Good for you for being concerned about your gargantuan film collection's trashy implications. But I don't think you need to choose between your passion for film and your nascent enviro consciousness. Firstly, I've found a place to degauss and recycle your discards. Secondly, where's the incentive to be an environmentalist if you have to jettison your movies? You need not eradicate fun, though owning Tons of Stuff violates the first precept of the trite-but-true eco-trinity: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle.
Must you swim in Gaia guilt? No. Laser discs and VHS tapes are small consumer items and, generally, smaller items have a smaller environmental impact -- fewer raw materials, lighter to ship, and, in this instance, no evil leaching poisons.
As you mentioned, the second precept -- Reuse -- will be fairly easy. I don't know a lot about the used VHS market, but I doubt you'll have much trouble off-loading to libraries, schools, yard sales, and friends.
When the reuse well runs dry -- if no one wants that battered copy of Klute -- it's on to Recycle. With your generous supply of identical materials, it'll be one-stop shopping for a recycler. Et, voila!: Send unwanted laser discs and VHS tapes to GreenDisk. GreenDisk is a large company involved in commercial electronic media reuse and recycling; they are also willing to absorb your personal laser discs and VHS tapes into their waste-reprocessing stream. Your tapes will be degaussed and resold to cities and police departments for surveillance tapes; your discs will be shredded and sold for plastics reuse.
But what is this degaussing? It's a fancy word for sticking videotape under a giant magnet. The modern process of electronic media erasure takes its name from Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, a brilliant 19th-century mathematician who calculated the orbits of asteroids, fathered the mathematical theory of electricity, and developed a measurement for magnetic induction. History has bestowed his name on the centimeter-gram-second unit of magnetic flux density, the gauss. Anyhoo, privacy protection is a large concern in the electronic media recycling field, and degaussing assures the erasure of delicate or personal materials through scrambling of the magnetic registers on audio- and videotape. GreenDisk guarantees degaussing, so any wretched home movies you've made are safe to send along with Krzysztof Kieslowski's masterworks.

Also :
Freecycle has been good place to give things a new home...

craigslist > your-city > free stuff

For the past two years we have been giving away the degaussed tapes toemployees, film students, interns, schools, and basically anyone who wantsthem. We do all we can to avoid dumping them in landfills.
Ronald Briggs
New Line Cinema

A Place To Donate:
http://www.actrecycling.org/donations/default.asp

Labels: , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]



<< Home