The environmental cost of VHS

Recently I’ve been cleaning out my room and like many people I have a rather large collection of VHS videos.

At the time they were really expensive items that were the latest technology, today we look back on them as a relic of pre-disk reading technology. They are by modern standards bulky tapes of a low quality which degrade over time.

My collection was about 30+ videos mostly of cartoons and films, I was looking into what to do with them and came across a few suggestions but mostly this was – sell them on ebay – give them away to charity. I tried selling them on ebay and even at a cut price I’ve only managed to sell two and I consider that in itself an achievement.

Its amazing to think how much VHS has devalued so quickly, if you do go into charity shops VHS aren’t actually worth anything at all maybe 50p at most. When you think about it we were spending a minimum of £15 per video if not more at the time – I think one of the reasons why DVD is so cheap now is that we’re all suffering from ’seen that paid the expensive price tag’ syndrome. In that we all know 10-20+ years down the line my DVD collection is going to be worth 50p each when we’re all using the next big thing in terms of movie data storage.

I’m sure that people who work in charity shops can see people coming with VHS a mile off and hope they dont venture in to give up a donation that isn’t really worth anything at all since not many people have working players anymore. So I started looking into getting VHS recycled.

What I didn’t realise that with this option there many plastic pieces within the VHS itself – the outer casing, the wheel mounts for the film, the plastic windows that let you see inside the tapes. Then theres also the screws which hold the whole unit together and the box. With that in mind there is no easy way to recycle your old VHS tapes, so even though you could put them in to be recycled they may not make it.

In the US they have a special VHS recycling program where convicts do community service to disassemble the tapes for recycling. I do think that it’s a good idea but when you consider how much time it’d take to take apart one VHS and then consider my 30+ collection of tapes and then multiply that by everyone in the UK, well quite frankly thats a lot of tapes!

I’m always surprised with such a high volume of VHS and a lack of demand more isn’t done about the waste that they generate. I know that its a problem with all kinds of technological formats – we throw one out without thought and replace the old with new but next time your about to chuck out that old pc / television / moblie phone remember about where its going and if there isn’t a better destination.

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