Environmental impact: disposable DVDs vs. CD-R
 

Many of you may have heard about attempts to sell disposable DVDs. As with the ill-fated Divx scheme Circuit City tried to foist on us back in the late 90s, environmentalists have complained about the problems with just tossing the DVD discs.

My question is: How is this different from tossing CD-Rs? I don't know about the rest of you, but at this point in time, I'm going through CD-R discs about the same way I was going through floppies back in the early 90s: an easy way to move stuff between 2 computers, usually resulting in a temporary disc that I didn't bother to label or hang on to. If throwing out DVDs is a concern, why is throwing out CD-Rs not? (Or is it, and I just haven't heard about it?)

Get a TechnoTrash can!

(no big searching wizardy involved ... this company was linked from the article, but I thought it was a neat idea.)

Of course it is a concern. Why would you need to hear about it to know that?

The DVD isssue is that they are talking about replacing the concept of a rental with disposable media, which will add a huge amount of waste plastic.

As for your CDs, perhaps a USB flash drive would be in order.

If you're going to use CD media for temporary use, at best use the reusable CD-RW discs. At the very least, leave the disc session open and use up it's capacity before contributing it to the choking piles of waste. Or, hold on to the used CD-R discs, and shingle your house with them when you have enough. :D

We humans already throw a shameful amount of material in the garbage, so any trash which can be easily prevented ought to be. Whenever I see someone throw an aluminum can in the trash, I want to kick them in the teeth.

USB flash drives are nice, but it's hard to match the 700MB capacity of a CD. CD-RW is our friend, despite the fact that he's a little slow.

Agreed. My question is, why are we not seeing people complaining about CD-Rs (or at least it's not reported in the press, that I can tell), but whenever disposable DVDs rear their head there's a crusade?

My guess is because CD-Rs aren't marketed as disposable, where the DVDs are. CD-Rs are very useful as a (semi-)permananet home for data, but disposable DVDs are just... disposable. Not even an option for them to stick around and be useful.

I guess in a way it makes sense... most of the shit that movie studios churn out these days is intellectually disposable anyway, so maybe these disposable DVDs are an apt medium.

I think the non-rental rental would have been a more useful medium if the cost weren't so high ... $7 for a movie you can only watch for 48 or so hours?

The Mr. Phelps nature of the product is pretty intriguing to me, but only useful if they could get the costs down to around $2-3.

There are a lot of DVDs you can buy and own outright for under $10, and not all of them suck.

Rent the same one from Blockbuster and you're out what, $5 for five days of use. Yes, I understand that the extra $2 is supposed to be overshadowed by the ease and convenience of not having to return the movie, but I don't think that most people would see it that way.

Come on ... how many times have you ACTUALLY 'rented' a movie from OnDemand on your cable system ... I think I did so once in the last couple of years ... and that was a couple of years ago. (it was that movie with Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones, Double Indemnity or something to give you a sense of the time frame.)

(Oh, and what I really need is for the trash haulage company in my apartment complex to add a "CD/DVD" bin to the big recycling container)

Now I do actually like the idea of MovieLink (requires MSInternet Exploiter to use) ... if I had a more comfortable chair in front of the computer, I would be using this.

I was just told by a friend, reading from an article, that Disney discontinued the test marketing of the disposable DVDs because more people were shoplifting them than buying them.