I was reading Linux Format the other day and noticed they printed an address that you could post your disks to, to have them recycled (good for the environment)

But I wondered how much fossil fuel would be burnt / carbon produced in the whole process even if I lived in the UK. When you take into account the actual postage and the whole getting to where it is to be recycled then the actual recycling.

Are we doing more damage trying to be green then if we were to not post the disk off and just put it in the rubbish?

Am I missing something obvious here?

It's hard to say; it always is.

If your garbage is handled in the same way as it is in the states, they'll typically separate the metals from the rest of the rubbish. It will go to a special section of the plant where it will be separated by metal type, cleaned, and eventually given to a smelting company to be melted down and used again.

I guess it depends on how its recycled. If they just wipe it and use it again then awesome. No extra special work needs to be done to break down the metal and smelt it into something else. It would also be great if they just tore down the HDs into individual parts and built new HDs right back out of them. But if they are doing exactly what the plant would do anyway then I'm not sure it's just a roundabout way of going about things.

In most cases drives sent for recycling are grinded to bits and sold as scrap metal. Reusing the drives/platters brings up privacy concerns, anything that has been written to the drive in the past can be recovered. This gets increasingly harder as those bits are written over. If you would like to recycle your drives and you are concerned about the data contained on them I would find a company that specifically says that they don't reuse the drives.

If you are really concerned about sending your drive off to someone there are a number of projects out there for reusing your old hard drives.

I personally have salvaged magnets to make wind turbines, the highly reflective platters were used in a solar concentrator and then was able to get the scrap weight for the rest of the aluminum and steel.

Check out instructables.com. There's projects for tesla turbines and speakers made from old HDs plus sountless other projects.

Thanks for the replies

When I said disks I should have said I meant the DVD's that come on the front of the magazine.