Is your CD collection gathering dust after years of neglect? Do you feel you have outgrown the old collection of yours? Do you think its time for you to be rid of it so that there is room for something new in its place? It’s always better to recycle or reuse. In this way the amount of pollution you contribute is reduced. Plus, as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Then here are a few things you can do other than just tossing your precious collection into the trash.

1. Donate some CDs to the hospital. Hospitals always use movies as a distraction for their patients during operations and long stays in the hospital especially for kids. Patients admitted in the hospital for long schedules of treatment will appreciate will be really grateful to you for this action on your part. But choose the right types of movies when donating to hospitals. You obviously don’t want to hurt anyone’s sentiments. So consider what types of movies the patients might enjoy – family comedy, cartoons, drama. In a hospital, not just the patients but even the resident nurses and doctors will enjoy the movies and the music on the CDs that you donate. Music will definitely soothe the nerves of all the stressed out staff at the hospital. So donating the CDs to a hospital or nursing home makes a lot of sense.

2. Another novel technique to get rid of those old CDs is to give them away to some children’s home, preschool or daycare. These CDs will provide good entertainment to the kids on days when they are restricted to their classrooms. Also, these CDs prove as great teaching and training resources depending on what sort of content they contain. Non-profit organizations could put your CDs to good use if you donate it to them. These tapes will in this way eventually end up being useful to someone or the other.

3. Some among us are good at working with our hands and can come up with creative ideas that we can implement using these CDs. Since CDs are bright and shiny they can be used to make attractive decoration adornments. Some examples include making a wall hanging with the CDs. Just drill holes on the CDs and string them together and then decorate the non-shiny side with bright colors to make up the wall hanging.

4. Now if you would like to retain your collection but don’t have the physical space to store them in your house then copying them on other electronic media like hard disks might be the way forward for you. Just put the CDs into your CD-ROM drives and copy them into the hard drives. Hard drives can store a lot more information but require very little space. Also the maintenance required for these is very low if the humidity around the storage area is kept low.

5. However, if your collection contains confidential and private data it is always better that you shred them rather than just tossing them into the trash. A variety of shredders are available commercially that can be used for this purpose. But care should be taken when it comes to disposal of the shredded waste. Check local laws and do the needful.

Now you see you just don’t have to throw away your compact disc collection which you painstakingly collected over the years just because you have run out of space or don’t have the time to keep an eye over them or the energy to keep the dust off of them.