I’ve just completed the first phase of digitizing my analog media, and now have about 200 VHS tapes to get rid of. Being a knee-jerk, pinko liberal, naturally I looked into ways of recycling them instead of just taking them to the landfill.
It looks like my best option would be to use Green Disk. I’d have to pay about $100 (including shipping) to have them recycle them for me. But frankly, I’m not sure it’s worth $100 to assuage my liberal conscience in this particular case. In the long run, a couple hundred tapes, about 100 lbs. of plastic, in a sanitary landfill is not exactly an ecological catastrophe. And I can think of other things I’d rather spend $100 on.
But if there are more fervent environmentalists who want to try to persuade me to send the tapes to Issaqua, WA (home of Green Disk), I’m listening.
I’d suggest taking them to a waste to energy plant if you can, modern ones can (and have to) remove almost all of the nasties and they are of great energy content and won’t breakdown in a landfill all that fast.
Then spend that $100 on something that will make a difference, perhaps invest in energy savings.
Yeah, it’s when you’re faced with shelling out actual, here-and-now cash that you find out how much you really care about your grandchildren’s generation.
My first thought was that $100 seems pricey for a bunch of tapes, but 200 is nearer to what I’d think of as a shed-load, so that’s not so bad.
Are they all taped-from-air, or do you have commercially-bought titles? If the latter, I’d be inclined to see if there was a charity nearby that might be grateful for them.
You might want to think about selling them on E-Bay or somesuch. Before you tell me “No one will ever want them”, let me point out something to you. Like far too many people, my fiance recently lost pretty much everything in a fire. We’re now trying to replace things, including video tapes which were ruined by it or couldn’t be recoverable. If any of those videotapes include University of Michigan football games, e-mail me or PM me and we’ll talk price. You might be surprised at people for whom they have some value. It’s worth a shot, anyway.
In this case it’s moot, however, because it wouldn’t be worth the effort to catalog what’s on them to try and find buyers, and selling hundreds of individual used tapes would be a life’s work for no money.
I suppose I could try selling them as a lot of on eBay or Craigslist, but I doubt I could get much for them and I’d just as soon be rid of them.
You could put them on Freecycle. I still have to use VHS tapes to copy stuff over from my DVR, so I still have tapes. As long as your tapes can still be recorded on/over, someone will take them. Another possibility is your local high school, if they have a media lab. Kids can use the tapes for projects (just make sure there’s no pr0n on any of them).
Perhaps a silly queston, but have you made sure the tapes were digitised correctly? It would be unfortunate if you were to chuck the tape of your baby’s first steps only to find that the digitised version was corrupt.
Thanks for the concern, but A) the tapes are mostly TV shows and movies recorded off TV, with precious little personal stuff (I don’t own a video camera) and B) in the case of the most important personal stuff (my appearance on Jeopardy!, for instance), I’m keeping the tape.
So as far as being banned from eBay, I’ve been looking over their policies and it seems that offering a bunch of used tapes without saying what was on them might not violate their rules. I wouldn’t be saying “Here’s the first season of The Simpsons I recorded off air,” which would be illegal and against their rules. I’d be saying “Here are some used tapes for you to re-use as you wish.” Would that get me in trouble?
(I understand that according to the Sony v. Universal decision, it would probably be technically illegal; I’m just trying to figure out where eBay draws its lines.)
Interestingly, there seem to be lots of auctions of pre-recorded tapes, but few or none for used, formerly-blank tapes. So maybe that’s my answer.
FYI, eBay’s penalties for these violations do not include banning for life:
Is Craigslist more relaxed about this than eBay?
As I said, it’s almost certainly moot, since I have houseguests coming next week and I want to be rid of these boxes soon.
romansperson: Thanks for mentioning Freecycle. I’ll check them out.
Give them to charity. Or give them to me. I could drive over and pick them up from you. If they’re commerically-made videotapes, I would be happy to take them, keep the ones that I want, and put the rest in my next donation to charity. If they’re personally-made ones, it’s not so interesting to me.
Thanks, but there are virtually no commercial tapes. Those have already been donated to charity. These are all formerly blank tapes with various stuff I’ve recorded off-air.
To eliminate the copyright concerns, couldn’t you just destroy the recorded info on them by running a strong magnet over each one and then try to sell/gift them as blank tapes? If you can find a market. I haven’t touched my several boxes of same since I bought my first DVD recorder (now on my third one).
An ordinary magnet isn’t sufficient to erase video tapes. But I do have a handheld bulk eraser somewhere (I think). I’ll think about it, but it may not be worth the time and effort.
I’d probably go with T-Bonhams solution. Incinerating garbage and recovering the energy is a good idea and plastic has a high energy content. It is possible that recycling the material from the tapes would entail both lots of energy and chemicals making the entire process not as environmentally friendly as it might appear.
But then I am not a knee-jerk, pinko liberal. I only recycle bottles and cans and that’s only because there is a deposit-refund system on those.
