According to Mirkarimi, city leaders believed that “trash cans become a magnet for more trash that exceeds the can itself. Ross Mirkarimi, the former sheriff, and supervisor of District 5 recalled having a meeting with Newsom and other high-ranking officials. But in 2007, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom decided that the best way to reduce garbage in San Francisco was to get rid of garbage cans. It used to be that the Mission and San Francisco had what most cities have: ubiquitous public litter cans. A public works employee loads trash that was left on the sidewalk into his truck in the Mission. It’s everyday litter - cans, old meals, food wrappers - the kind of trash residents would normally toss in a receptacle. “It gets disgusting.”īut it is not only human feces, which residents can always call 311 to clean up. “Clean streets and cleanliness is a basic human need,” Mayorga said. They clean it up, but the problem persists. Some Best Buy stores collect old VHS tapes for recycling too, so that's another spot to check.Angel Mayorga, a 63-year-old resident who has lived in the Mission his whole life, also often uses the 311 application on his iPhone to send notices to San Francisco Public Works. While the price tag is a bit steep for some old hunks of plastic, McCubbin adds that you can split a box with friends and neighbors to bring the cost down and help everyone clear out clutter responsibly. For $60 to $130, they'll send you a box to fill with various types of electronics and disks to send back to them, overcoming barriers of volume and cost. You can also look into companies that offer bulk recycling services for a fee, such as GreenDisk and TerraCycle. Just make sure to wipe things like laptops and cellphones first in case they have any sensitive information on them. If you go this route, McCubbin recommends using it as an opportunity to get rid of all the old electronics you have lying around the house. You'll likely find that there is either a local store that accepts drop-offs or an occasional disposal event that you can attend. If that's the case, you have a few options: First, look to see if your city or town has an e-waste collection drop-off zone by scanning this database. While ideally, you'll be able to keep these tapes in use, sometimes it's just not in the cards and you do need to recycle them. You can also batch your lower-value VHS tapes in a bundle and sell them that way to quickly get all of them off your hands and make a few dollars doing it. Here are a few places to look into selling. I spotted a VHS tape of the '90s kid classic Air Bud during a recent trip to my local vintage shop, and a scroll through eBay revealed that some people are willing to pay upward of $100 for untouched VHS tapes of classic movies like Air Bud. "Interestingly, there's a little bit of a market for the produced tapes right now," says McCubbin, who notes that they've become a collectors’ item for those who still have working VCR players, even though these officially stopped being sold back in 2016. That second category, however, can be resold-and you might be surprised by how much money you can get for them. Home videos can be brought into the 21st century and digitized through services like Costco or LegacyBox. Whenever she works with clients who have tons of old VHS tapes (pretty often, it turns out), the first thing she has them do is separate them into two piles: Home videos and commercial tapes of movies, shows, etc. So, where does that leave those of us who have tons of these tapes at home and no way to use them? That's the question I posed to Tracy McCubbin-a professional organizer who takes an eco-minded approach to decluttering. For now, just remember that VHS tapes don't belong in your blue bin or your trash can, as they can leach harmful materials and metals into landfills. That's where independent companies that collect e-waste for a fee come in. Most curbside programs can't justify collecting these tapes since they can't guarantee that they'll get enough of them to profit off of. The tricky thing is that in order for this process to make sense financially to a recycler, they'll need a lot of materials. In most places, they fall under the category of electronic waste, which is notoriously tricky to dispose of responsibly.Īs David Beschen, the CEO of e-waste recycler Greendisk previously told mbg, recycling these items requires breaking them down into their constituent parts (in the case of VHS tapes: a plastic outer shell and a multilayer magnetic film), which can then be resold to suppliers who incorporate these parts into something new. A quick scan through my local recycling rules shows that VHS tapes cannot be recycled in my area, and I expect it's the same for you.
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