Build a Staircase to the Moon with CD’s and DVD – Recycling – (Humour).

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The other day I blogged about the dangers to our environment of continuing to make little plastic frisbies filled with media content.

“EMI often ships out unwanted CDs to China so they can be recycled “Now there’s no better use for them than to be crushed up and trampled on,” the source added.

EMI is said to have planned this recycling scheme to cut costs after losing 263 million pounds in 2007.

Today I came across a site that claimed that we had been making 30 billion of these things a year.

The sizes (thickness varies from .5 mm to 1.4 mm) depending on the technology and the year made.

A few years ago there was a real problem with disposal of unsold music CD’s when landfills in the USA refused to accept hundreds of thousand s of discs marked for destruction.

The problem was solved by the music industry by shipping the returns to china for disposal.

Actually I thought China was on the same planet as the rest of us earthlings and needed the same ecological considerations as everyone else’s backyard. But obviously not….. according to the music biz.

We live in an age where a Terrabyte hard-disk can hold ones entire DVD and CD collection and continue to hold it in a scratch free condition.

So what do people do with their CD’s and DVD’s once they are ripped and transferred onto the Disk drive attached to the TIVO / DVR / Home Entertainment system ?

You can see where this is going dear reader. Obviously, straight to the rubbish bin or in the case of selective council landfills, China.

So today, having a few idle minutes I calculated the production of all CD’s as being (arbitrarily) 1982-2010 x 30 billion x 1 mm thickness and I discovered that we have a new potential use for our CD’s.

If we glued each CD/DVD to the next one, we actually have enough to reach the moon 2.18 times….. In other words we could build a staircase and forget all about those expensive rockets……

(Distance to the moon only 384,403 kilometres.)

References:

Distance to the Moon

http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/education/activities/expmoon/distancemoon.pdf

Thickness of CD Roms and DVD’s

http://www.pctechguide.com/34DVD_Technology.htm

CD’s in Landfills

http://stanford.wellsphere.com/green-living-article/recycle-your-cds-and-dvds-keep-your-technotrash-out-of-landfills/789366

Robbie Williams’ unsold CDs shipped to China – mirror.co.uk