TV & Internet...

My wife and I are finally getting rid of most of our old VHS tapes. It's about time. I mean, we haven't plugged our VCR in for more than a year. Those old tapes were just sitting around gathering dust, and some of them can be re-used, while others can be recycled.

Our first trip was to the local library. Many of the older patrons in this town still use their VCRs quite heavily, as do the vacationers who have cabins here and haven't upgraded to DVD yet. Our library stocks a supply of video tapes for patrons, and also runs a very nice used book store which sells tapes for a few bucks each. So a few boxes of tapes went there.

Next stop was another nearby used bookstore, which also sells used VHS tapes. They took another box. (Did I mention that we had a lot of video tapes?)

Thrift stores could have also been an option. There are three within a few miles of our home, but the library and the used book store took so many, we didn't need to make another stop.

A few rarities (old horror movies and the like) went up on eBay or Amazon's Marketplace. There wasn't a huge market for these flicks, but collectors did pick up a few that weren't available on DVD.

That got rid of 99% of our pre-recorded tapes. But we also had several boxes of movies and TV shows that we had taped off the airwaves. You can't sell or give those things away, but we didn't want to chuck them in the trash, so it was time to look into recycling.

GreenDisk served our purposes pretty well.  They'll take a 20 pound box for $6.95, and every additional pound costs just 30 cents. The price goes toward a shipping label, and you send them your video tapes (or anything from a whole list of products) for recycling.

There, problem solved! Give it a shot yourself. Free up some space, put old tapes to good re-use, and keep that trash out of the landfill in the process!