Can you throw away cassette tapes

People also often make interesting lights and lamps from VHS tapes. You can recycle the clear plastic windows in the front of the tapes to emit light. For example, this YouTube tutorial uses the tape to create a beautiful lamp. Want to know how to dispose of VHS tapes and cassette tapes while keeping your precious memories alive? Before recycling or sending tapes off for VHS disposal, you should save that irreplaceable content by converting your VHS tapes to digital format.

To use their service, all you need to do is order a Legacybox kit. Once you receive your kit, just pack your VHS tapes along with the safety barcode labels that come with it. This is to make sure that all your tapes are properly tracked and accounted for. Then send the kit back to them for free.

After that, they'll send you back your newly digitized videos along with your original VHS tapes within a reasonable amount of time. What one of the things I appreciate the most about Legacybox is that you get regular personalized email updates about your items, giving you peace of mind that your memories are being well-taken cared of.

No other digitizing service does that as far as I know. Meanwhile, what do you do with old cassette tapes once you're ready to get rid of them? How can you convert their contents to digital format? Good thing is, Legacybox can also convert your audio cassette tapes to whatever digital format you choose. With their Convert Cassette Tapes to Digital service, any kind of tape is fair game for conversion, whether it's a compact cassette, audio cassette, reel-to-reel tape, or cassette tape.

Legacybox is popular for a lot of users because their professionals, technology, and facilities are some of the best in the industry when it comes to digitizing analog media.

Their prices are reasonable as well, which allows you to preserve your priceless moments without burning a hole in your pocket. I like them because they have allowed me to breathe new life back to my analog media and recover important memories, which is the whole point, isn't it? However, this also makes recycling VHS tapes difficult. Because if they sit in the landfill for too long, the toxic metals in VHS tapes will seep into the ground.

VHS tapes will degrade over time. Even with being kept in climate control and whatnot, things will adhere, the tape will get weak, and it will lose quality over time for just sitting.

The same can be said when you recycle cassette tapes. Here's the thing: The value of getting anything useful out of them is below the cost in person-hours required to break the tapes down for plastic recycling.

In fact, next to Styrofoam , those two things might be the most difficult household items to recycle. Because of this, VHS tapes ultimately won the market for home video tapes. VHS tapes are made from 5 plastic and Mylar. The outside case is made from 5 plastic polypropylene , which will take centuries to biodegrade via microorganisms or photodegrade via sunlight.

The plastic tape inside, on the other hand, is made from Mylar polyethylene terephthalate. Computer data tapes have similar disposal and recycling issues to old plastic VCR tapes. For decades, old computer data tapes were widely used to back up data on mainframe and minicomputers used by businesses, institutions, government, and the military. The data stored on these old tapes are often highly sensitive. Yes, VHS tapes are recyclable. DiJiFi can also digitize microcassette tapes that were used for personal consumer recorders and answering machines.

Contact DiJiFi today and let us help with the digitization of your tape cassettes. Cart 0. Sign In My Account. Recycling Tape Cassettes Tape cassettes are extremely difficult to dispose of because of the type of plastic that composes the shell. Donate or Resell Your Cassettes There are plenty of people who collect cassette tapes or still use cassette players for music. Teresa Lewis : By separating them from the boxes I will be left with just a shoe box of cassette tapes saving a quarter of the space they originally occupied though.

Hi I have just tried the email address to Kevin but the email bounced back, any idea if this scheme is still running for recycling cassettes? Happy new year! You may want to add a note to this article as you did with EMS, or archive it…. Thanks for sharing this information, Greenitup.

What I found out was this: Magnetic tape is actually toxic to human beings. It contains metals that are known to effect our health. I imagine it does this to animals as well. Hi LC, thanks for stopping by.

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Scotty Stevens says:. February 10, at am. Alea says:. February 10, at pm. Step 3: If there are no e-waste recyclers in your area, visit GreenDisk. Many e-waste recycling programs across the country will actually recycle VHS tapes as well. It may take a few searches and phone calls, but there may be someone in your area. You can click the button below to go to the Earth recycling search to find an e-waste recycler in your area.

You can easily recycle your VHS tapes through them by packaging them up and sending them in. You can grab their address here.

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