My 19 year old son had a massive clearout recently. Among other things, he decided that he no longer wanted any of his PC games. Some of them, like World of Warcraft, you cannot resell according to their terms and conditions but there were others that were reusable.
We usually trade in games at Game but I knew they did not take PC games. I gave up on Ebay a few years ago when it became more of a professional sellers platform. I am going to try it again for my daughter’s DS games but I usually find that, by the time I have bought a jiffy bag and gone to the post office, it really isn’t worth the £1.99 or whatever that I have got for the item, even if the postage is just about covered.
Our local authority do not offer Cd/DVD recycling so that was out. No problem, I thought, I will send them off to that recycling place I sent the last lot. It was great. You filled in a form online, chose one of their couriers to come and pick up your box of unwanted Cds and DVDs for a small payment and that was that. Cds gone and no landfill used! Off I went to good old Google but I could not find any companies recycling Cds. I found one or two that dealt only with companies or public authorities but not one that dealt with individual members of the public. I came across several articles on recycling CDs that were published 5 or 6 years ago. They had links to recycling companies but none of the links worked. In desperation I finally searched for the companies themselves and found that they had all been dissolved several years ago. Hmm.
Where to recycle PC Games?
When I had googled CD recycling , several trade-in sites had come up, including Zapper and Momox. They are both companies that offer you money for your stuff – books, CDs, DVDs etc as long as you have at least £10 worth. The way it works is that you type or scan in the item’s barcode and they tell how much they will give you for it. And you keep adding items at least until you reach the minimum of £10. A lot of reviews say that once they get your stuff, the amount you get goes down considerably as they claim they are not in good condition and this has always put me off using them. However as I could not find another option and as part of my ongoing research into ways of responsibly decluttering, I decided to give one of them a go as an experiment. I decided to start with Zapper as years ago one of the founders used to work with my husband. After I had typed in several barcodes, I gave up, as they did not want any of them! I then tried the Momox site and they took 16 of the 20 odd games I had.
Once you have agreed to do the trade, you register with the site, pack up your items and print out a courier label. I chose Hermes as they seemed to have more collection points (usually newsagents) near me. I took the parcel in on 11th May and Momox haven’t received it yet. They are in Leipzig so I guess it may take a few days. I will post an update when the games have been received and processed.
What did I do with the approximately 8 games I had left? I took out any paper such as the cover and the instructions and then binned the rest, hating the fact that I had to do it. At least now my son buys PC games online so he can just delete any he no longer wants.
If anyone has found anywhere to recycle CDs etc in the last 6 months, let me know. It does seem wrong that we are producing things that are going to cause problems for generations to come.
