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Comparing the disposal of discarded CD discs in China and the United States

Industry News > Comparing the disposal of discarded CD discs in China and the United States

Scrap discs are a treasure

The finished optical disc is composed of base material and metal plating. Optical discs have very high requirements for base production materials, which are mainly manifested in high transparency, thermal stability and impact resistance. The base material for the production of optical discs is polycarbonate, which is synthesized from substances extracted from petroleum. It is a material that is in short supply in the world, and the price per ton is as high as 16,000 yuan.

Scrap discs are all treasures, and everything from the base material to the metal coating can be recycled. After being recycled, the base material can be used as a low-level optical disc base material, and can also be used as the shell packaging of some electronic products (such as mobile phones, digital cameras, etc.), as well as common outer packaging materials in daily life or a large number of other engineering plastics. The metal coatings of optical discs are all high-purity metals, and their recycling value is even higher. Each disc contains gold with a thickness of 40-100 nanometers. If you recycle 100 discs, you can get gold worth $8.

United States

At the CD Recycling Center of America in Salem, New Hampshire, old records are transported here in bundles every day, then made into polycarbonate plastic pellets (PC), and finally used to make cars and homes. Durable items such as construction materials and glasses.

As the largest waste plastic destination country in developed countries, my country has restricted the import of cardboard and most plastics since 2018, making polycarbonate plastic pellets made of CD recycled by the US CD Recycling Center nowhere to sell. Only seek other channels and internal breakthroughs.

Therefore, some organizations in the United States, such as GreenDisk, provide drop boxes for discarded CDs and other outdated technologies. They sent the CD collected from the technology delivery box to the National Association of the Blind Industry, where they were sorted and ground into polycarbonate sheets. These plastic raw materials are then shipped to manufacturers to make plastic materials for sale, including bobbins used to produce 3D printing filaments. GreenDisk also works with companies and institutions such as Warner Bros., Disney and the Library of Congress to process CDs.

Former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regional director Judith Enck said that from a global perspective, recycling CDs is not currently an important environmental priority. The plastic recycling rate in the United States has been very low, and the problem of plastic recycling has been slow. This is definitely an issue that requires attention.

China

At present, the domestic treatment methods for used discs are mainly landfill and incineration. However, for such special electronic waste, traditional landfill and incineration are not appropriate. If it is simply landfilled, since the base material of the optical disc is polycarbonate (PC), it will remain in the soil for a long time. As the number of waste optical discs increases year by year, landfilling is obviously not an effective treatment method; in addition, the metal content of the optical disc will Into the soil and groundwater, although it only occupies about 0.8% of the total disc, but the thickness is only a few microns, so the contact area with the soil is very large. For example, a 100,000-ton disc contains only 800 tons of metal, but its area It is equivalent to the surface area of about 1.5 million tons of 5 mm thick metal plates, so the pollution rate is quite fast, and it also makes it impossible to recycle precious metals such as gold and silver.

Simple incineration of waste optical discs is likely to produce carcinogens-dioxins, which can cause air pollution. At the same time, dioxins are very stable and have a high melting point. They are extremely difficult to dissolve in water and can be dissolved in most organic solvents. It is a colorless, odorless, fat-soluble substance, so it is very easy to accumulate in the body and is harmful to the human body.

Nowadays, the worldwide oil crisis makes the price of polycarbonate petrochemical products continue to rise. Such a simple disposal method is obviously a great waste of resources. In the context of China's rapid economic development, the problem of waste optical discs has become increasingly prominent, and the reasonable recycling and resource utilization of waste optical discs are of great significance for saving raw materials and protecting the environment.

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Comparing the disposal of discarded CD discs in China and the United States

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