A message from Bruce Bennett, the founder of The Compact Disc Recycling Center of America

The Compact disc was launched in 1983 with 800,000 units released in the USA alone. By 1990, that number reached 1 billion discs per year. By the 21st century, we have some how found the need to manufacture almost 30 billion discs per year. Millions of these discs yearly are finding their way into our landfills and incinerators. I assume this is because people are not aware on what to do with them, and for the most part, just throw them away. This is not good for our environment. We are utilizing several natural resources from the Earth to manufacture these discs, but we are not replenishing the Earth with the raw material that we take from it.

Why does a compact disc become not needed? Well there’s several reasons including:

I am not preaching here. I don’t preach. I am simply paying forward valuable information that I have learned from the many years of working in the Compact Disc industry. For many Years I owned, operated, and managed a fairly large, successful CD & DVD duplication company known as Superdups. This company, as well as many others, have been responsible for manufacturing and packaging millions and millions of Compact Discs and supplying them to the world. As I chased company growth and positioning in my industry, It has been coming clearer and clearer for me to share my years of knowledge of the Compact Disc, but more importantly, my new founded effort to educate world in regards to the importance of recycling old, bad, non-needed, and non-wanted compact discs.

Ready to go deeper? Here’s a few statements from me, and if you agree, read on…

This gets deep…

The Earth is a perfect ecological and spiritual environment…

…almost like our own little ant farm or planetarium that we live in. Like a perfectly built spaceship, it has enough supplies to sustain life, growth, and evolution as it travels through the vastness of space and the universe on a journey that some like to call life, others like to call destiny. Some feel best to simple call it the agnostic.

You hear it all the time… ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Eventual what comes from the Earth will, and should, go back into the Earth. Natural things will degrade and recycle themselves, using time and the elements of nature that are built into the Earth. This is how our perfect environment was designed to work. It has a self replenishing systems that utilizes it’s nature, elements, and resources to work together like a perfectly built regeneration machine.

Then along came Man, human beings with an incredibly complex brain that is barely used to it’s full potential. Then add emotion, a lack of notice to their perfectly built planetarium call Earth that they live on, and came from. Man’s thinking capabilities has the need for growth and knowledge, and growth begets growth, knowledge begets knowledge. The need to breed. The need to populate. The need to expand. The need to shelter. The need to harvest. The need to feed. This need to feed, with an identification of an over populated Earth, forced man to create it’s central leveraging system – a system called commerce, regulated by money.

We live in a world ruled by commerce, regulated by money. Commerce focuses more on the manufacturing of items, more than the recycling of them…

Whether it’s Gold, land, livestock, farmland, precious metals or gems, man has discovered ways to put these things into commerce. In the past, people traded crops, livestock, and water to live, and harvested those foods from the land they owned. Fresh water was desperately needed to help grow the foods.

Think about it… He who controls the land actually gets to control the ability to grow food and nurture livestock, and utilize the fresh water on or under that land. Land, land, land. We all need it to stake a claim in our wonderful little spaceship like planetarium. If we’re overpopulated, and only a small fraction of our population owns and controls the land, they control the growth of the water and food that is or can be produced on that land.

As most land has already been claimed, the people born after the fact missed the boat, unless they were lucky enough to inherit land, or work hard enough to purchase it from someone that has passed away or wants to dissolve their land wealth, which usually older people do when they come to a realization at retirement that they rather spend the money they’ve earned and remaining time on this wonderful Planet Earth traveling, seeing, enjoying, and experiencing it.

So if you can’t inherit land, you will have to buy it. To buy it, the modern day trade mechanism is MONEY. This fuels the need for economy and growth. Many people work hard to save money and buy a home, which is actually an important need… It’s instinct to have a shelter. Follow your instinct. But always try to keep in mind how important land is, as well as it’s resources on, above, or underneath it.

As Earth’s hard working people try to save their money, they work harder. Their efforts help improve their company’s product output. Some of these companies provide services. Some of these companys provide advice or consulting. MANY of these companies produce or manufacture products. Some of these products are natural. Some of these products are manufactured. Everything on Earth comes from the Earth, but I refer to natural as what will decompose or naturally transcend itself back into the Earth, as the Earth allows naturally. Commerce has forced the contined to to keep on manufacturing man made products.

Plastic is not a natural resource, but when recycled, does save trees…

Some manufactured products are man made. I refer to man made items as those that utilize “natural elements” and combine them into a new form of unnatural products that will not naturally decompose back into our Earth. Plastic is one of these man made products. CDs, dvds, jewels cases, etc. are plastic products that will not decompose naturally. They need to be recycled into raw material for manufacturing of other products, which will require less natural resources from Earth to make these new products. The basic raw elements of plastic are oil and gases, along with combinations of other elements and processes to create the final plastic. There are many types of plastic, but for intent and purpose, I am basically referring to polycarbonate and polystyrene which is the basic plastic used in the compact disc industry. When these natural resources are in their natural state, the Earth will know what to do with it. It’s programmed.

But plastic is not an element of natural state. It requires reuse. As a matter of fact, some plastic reuse is saving OUR MOST IMPORTANT NATURAL RESOURCE – TREES. More and more products are being created and manufactured out of recycled plastic, such as composite decking, posts, fences, and other home building materials, which would previously been built from tree wood.

Save a tree. Please recycle a CD. Trees give us air, while we give them Co2. We need them to stay alive. Humans and animal life require oxygen to breathe. We need to breathe to live. Earth’s plant life requires Co2 to survive and grow. Now let’s see… Hmmmmmm… Coincidence? Doubt it. We’re both on the same planet sharing the same elements and require each other to survive… You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize this. As a matter of fact, most of you know this fact from basic education. But many people forget it. They get caught up in the daily tasks of life trying to progress in a world of individualism and… Money. But there is still a lot of love out there. So please try to find a tree and love it. I didn’t necessarily say “Hug it”, but how about silently looking at it, admiring its beauty, and its ability to live in harmony with you. Then thank it. Then be thankful that more and more people are recycling plastic and saving trees.

On a positive note, Compacts discs are saving trees. More data and information is being sent via the Internet or on a compact disc. The Printing industry is declining because the media data industry is growing. The good news is less paper will be required, so less trees will be needed to make that paper. And fortunately, the public awareness to recycle paper has worked well to help create new paper from old paper. Recycling of paper has saved many trees as well. The unbalanced problem we will soon have facing the earth is that more plastic is created, and will at some time need to be recycled as well. Start being plastic conscious now!

Human beings are basically little recycling plants…

Think of this. You started as an embryo and 9 months later you are a baby human. You eat and drink water for nourishment, for this nutrition is required to maintain your growth and path through life. You eat food, and remember that all food, whether natural or man-made, original came from the Earth. I really don’t need to tell you how your body digests the food, recycles it, and how it leaves your body, and where it goes. Human beings are little recycling plants. We have learned, for the most part, what to consume to grow properly, healthy, and live a healthy life. We often are warned about man made foods that are not healthy for our bodies. Many people ignore these warnings daily. Whether the foods we consume are healthy or not, they eventually end up in a septic system or sewer plant, back into the earth as a solid, liquid or gas.

Has anyone ever compared a fart to global warming?

We have learned to build systems to place our post food consumption waste. These systems are simply called septic systems or sewer systems. We have no problem following the same rules and proper usage of these items. However, there’s other waste products that we generate from use, other than what we eat. We use these daily, such as newspapers, magazines, cups, plates, forks, automobiles, wood, and on and on and on. Just because we didn’t eat it, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have proper systems in place to reclaim, re-use or recycle it. I believe the world is starting to finally realize the importance of identifying the necessity of proper trash placement, and what can go in the trash and what shouldn’t. The world is also starting to finally realize the importance of identifying the necessity of proper incinerator burning, and what can be burned and what should not. As for plastic, when placed in the trash it can’t degrade back into the earth, and when it is burned, it admits gases into our atmosphere. Here’s a simple thought everyone can follow. If you’re in a car with several people, and one of them passes gas from their previous food digestion, it is generally absolutely horrible to smell and breathe. But there is always options, like rolling down the window, getting fresh air, or even kicking the offender out of the car. Now, let’s say if Earth was like a car, or even a spaceship, and we’re all the passengers, as well as all the companies, buildings, and incinerators. We would be constantly generating gases that we have to breath constantly. The Earth doesn’t have a window to roll down. But it does have natural elements that can help convert some of the man made products back into other elements. We have an obligation to help the Earth balance all the natural resources it has and keep them in balance, especially when the human race has grown to an amazing population of seven billion plus. Now that’s a sign of misbalance. Gases and Co2 emissions have recently be labeled as the main cause of Global Warming. Since spaceship earth does not have a window to roll down, who are we going to kick out of the spaceship?

The Earth can’t recycle plastic…

But if humans really need it for certain future uses, we can recycle it and reuse it, rather than continue to take natural elements from the Earth to create new plastic. Mankind needs to focus from this point in time moving forward, keeping as much of its natural resources in their natural state. And if a product requires manufacturing into a man made item that will basically not naturally recycle itself, than man has the duty to find, collect, recycle and reuse as much of that product into new products in any new way we can. Compact Discs are one of these man made products…

My teaching - High School. Being a musician in several bands. Owning my own company.

My loving – My beautiful wife, my family, my dogs, my birds, my fish, the sunset, the nature around me.

My inspiration: The regeneration cycle every Spring. The smell of a Summer field. The beauty of an Autumn day. The smell of Winter’s first snow. Epcot – Spaceship Earth. Star Trek Episode – The Gorne. Finding a moment to watch, enjoy, and marvel at the sunset every day.

Sincerely,
Bruce Bennett – A Realist.

P. S. Thank you for all your efforts in helping us help save the earth.