America Recycles Day

November 15 was America Recycles Day. A day that is dedicated to encouraging Americans (though from what I can tell most of the time people say Americans they mean only USA) to recycle and to buy recycled products. I regularly recycle via curbside recycling and Abitibi paper boxes. On this day I dropped off at the zoo, they were having a recycling event in which they took various recyclables that curbside recycling does not, a box of mostly cdrs; though there were some dvdrs, aol discs, and 3.5 floppy disks as well. I used to trade anime fansubs via the mail until high speed internet and dvdrs became common.

I had traded cdrs for several years (mostly through the now mostly dead Noated forum though did so on a few other now completely gone sites) and had amassed a rather large number of cdrs. Over time I had watched them and no longer wanted the particular series, acquired the actual dvds, got better quality versions, received duplicates, put them on dvdrs to save room, poor quality cdrs that had become damaged, etc. as well as various other cds such as AOL, Netzero, old Linux distros, game sample discs, etc. I felt it was a waste to toss them out so I instead would toss them into a big box saying to myself that I am going to recycle them. I kept putting it off until I saw a flier advertising national recycling day and decided to drop them off (I first emailed the company that was doing the computer recycling to see if they took cdrs). I had looked into recycling them in the past but most places I saw that would recycle them charged or you had to ship them to the company which considering the number and weight of discs I had would have been costly.

Prior to recycling the discs I browsed a few of the discs to see if I was tossing anything I did not want to. I only looked at a few but did find some interesting things (though usually not the content). Things like how poor the quality of some of them were but at the time it had not bothered me (I still will watch things with poor video quality on occasion like youtube videos) and how my computer could no longer play some of them. For example, a few videos I looked at had Intel/Ligos Indeo Interactive 4.0 codec which is no longer supported and does not play on Vista (and is difficult to get to play on any video players including players that play most things like VLC because the 5.0 codec does not play 4.0, or doesn't do so well, and the codec is copyrighted and no longer supported by the company that made it). At the time though the codec was pretty popular with Microsoft (Btw I can get them to play by converting them to a different format but did not bother). I was also surprised about how many AOL discs were in that box there had to be at least 50 and also a few AOL 3.5 floppy's. I had a lot of internet discs from other companies like Netzero, Juno, People PC, MSN, etc. How many discs did those companies mail out?