CD recyclers accept only WHOLE CDs, not fragments or shredded up CDs. This is, in part, due to the sorting process, because shreds and small pieces of CDs are messy and difficult to sort out from the regular recyclables and trash, thus the material is discarded as eWASTE which ends up in landfill. If you have ever shredded or cut up a CD-R, you know how messy the resulting pieces are...the metallic foil gets everywhere, has static cling, and is tough to clean.
The recycling problem is that CDs contain both metal foil and polycarbonate, thus whenever they are shredded, the resulting "mush" isn't pure and therefore discarded as eWaste instead of possibly being recycled. By leaving discs whole and intact, a CD may be fully recycled because the foil and polycarbonate remain pure.
The Disc Eraser is the first and only device that promotes recycling. Simply dispose the erased disc in any plastics recycling bin, and your local recyclers will sort them out and send to the CD recyclers to be melted down whole. Most recyclers do this already for AOL and old software CDs that they find in the trash, so the Disc Eraser will leave the disc intact, yet securely unrecoverable, then it gets properly recycled instead of being dumped as eWaste, which is what happens to shredded or broken particles resulting from conventional CD destruction methods and shredders.
It's setting a new trend in environmental technology. The general public still thinks that a CD must be shredded or cut up in order to securely destory the data, which is not the case anymore with the Disc Eraser's Optical-Strip technology. Recycling is even more secure than shredding because the whole disc is melted down and reused.
