At the risk of opening a rather large can of worms involving general manufacture and it's impact on the environment, we thought we would write a little something about Polycarbonate discs themselves to spread a little education.
We think of our UK production facility at Alpha Duplication to be environmentally conscious and as a commercial printer we take the impact on the environment very seriously. Paper & card down streams for recycling is relatively straight forward and, by ensuring its waste volume is regulated and organised correctly, the factory floor has set the required pace for our recycling agency to ensure the largest percentage can be reused or responsibly broken down. CDs, however are made mostly of Polycarbonate, which is notoriously difficult but very plausible to recycle.
As a manufacturer of polycarbonate discs we go out of our way to celebrate specialist avenues for recycling our waste and make every effort possible to ensure that discs do not end up in general landfill. By forwarding polycarbonate to the recycling plants, the discs go on to become Headlights, Taillights or Dashboard Instrument Panels for vehicles, multi use food and drink containers, even electronic housing for things such as laptops and smartphones. It's pretty clever stuff really.
Recycling is much preferred to the vague time span for the material to decompose, which is anywhere between 50-1000 years (that's a long time!). Recycling polycarbonate is a serious business and luckily there are many services out there able to process the material and who invest in the UK manufacturing industries circular economy benefit all of us on the island. These services are open to commercial manufacturers and end user consumers and not too difficult to find in todays world wide web infrastructure.
Aside from the Polycarbonate there is, of course, some shiny stuff in the disc...that would be aluminium, and it is one of the most widely recycled materials in global manufacturing and consumer waste. There are serval magical processes to separate the metal from it's polycarbonate casing and they all come with a list of science-type wording like Density-based separation, Electrostatic sorting and Eddy current separation (No, not a person called "Eddy" sorting it by hand- It's something to do with "whirlpools"-We'll leave you to look that up if you are interested). Science talk, behind, the aluminium is the "simple" part of the process and get's recycled commonly into cans and such like.
As a manufacturer of these products, we do our homework and we like to share this information with you to ensure you understand all of your waste options and understand that we take the environmental impact of what we do very seriously. We also ask that if you have exhausted all other possibilities - even if you have upcycled your waste discs to keep the magpies away from your home grown vegetable plants for a few years and still need to dispose of the products - to do your local research and find the closest avenues to you to ensure they are recycled. It's likely there are services not too far away and who knows, you could be drinking from a Coca-Cola can at the wheel of your brand new set of wheels knowing that a disc you once owned could well be part of the scene you find yourself in.
