We’ve covered on VHS cassettes before but now Suzy has emailed asking about their now redundant solid cases:

I have some old vhs tape cases. The cases are made of a plastic shell to hold the video that is glued to a cardboard outer layer with the artwork printed on it.

Is it possible to recycle this plastic? I don’t see any recycling symbols but I’d hate to just throw them away!

There must be thousands and thousands of these things kicked about as people dumped their old videos. So any suggestions for recycling or reusing them?

(Photo by Suzy – thanks Suzy!)

We’ve already looked at reuse ideas for old fashioned lightbulbs but what about recycling for the supposedly greener variety?

A friend of ours, Denyerec, has prodded me a couple of times about recycling energy saving light bulbs and tubes because he’s got a growing pile of them:

I have a fear that the energy saving madness is going to be offset by the environmental damage caused by inevitably casually discarded tubes.

Whenever we’re chatting about it, another friend always points out that they have to be disposed of carefully because of the mercury in all compact fluorescent lamps – but none of us have any particular idea of how to go about doing this.

Any ideas?

(Photo by vranarc)

Robert Adler, one of the guys that co-invented the remote control, died last week.

I suspect when a piece of remote-controlled equipment dies, people just sling out the remote too but are there any way to reuse them? Let’s assuming getting the equipment fixed isn’t possible or feasible, are there any uses for the now-redundant remote control?

Or are there any places that re-sell them? We lost our tv remote control a few years ago and after searching everywhere, bought a replacement – but the replacement was brand new, when a second-hand one would have sufficed. Then, because life is just like that, we found the original and so now have a spare – is there any way for us to pass it on?

I’ve always been a film fanatic and amassed quite a collection of videos over the years until DVDs came along. Most of my pre-recorded ones were given away and the ones we recorded ourselves went to live in the attic along with the VCR itself. A couple of years on, they’re still up there.

I hadn’t thought of them though until I posted the blog on televisions a couple of weeks ago then Brian emailed to say he had a similar collection of now-redundant tapes too – and now here we are: how can we reuse or recycle video tapes?
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A couple of weeks ago, my mum and dad’s tv died after seventeen years of faithful service.

Before I could say “ooh, I wonder how that could be reused…”, they whisked it off to the tip for the dutiful tip people to (hopefully) send it for recycling.

But still the question remains in my head – how could an old tv set be re-used? And does anyone know of any recycling schemes if one’s local “household waste sorting site” doesn’t offer the service?

(Photo by eidesign)