What Happens When You Try to Recycle a Video Game?

We take a look at what happens when you try to recycle a video game, plastic box and all.

Written and presented by Chris Bratt:

Design and art direction by Anni Sayers:

[TransSappho]

I love how Chris just walked up to a guy at a recycling plant and somehow ended up getting an interview with one of the highest up higher ups in this field

[zodayn]

I quite like the football manager box. It looks more sleek and luxurious when all of it is printedon all sides rather than a piece of paper behind a layer and in a generic plastic case. Props to Sega for rolling it out to other studios.

[PeopleMakeGames]

Obviously, the best thing you can do with your unwanted games is to resell or donate them, however... we're interested in what happens if that's not an option. What should you do with your broken discs and boxes? We try to find out.

[PeopleMakeGames]

Also, for those of you thinking about it: that Football Manager code has already been redeemed. You cheeky git.

[BudgetBuildsOfficial]

In 2030 I fully expect a playthrough of Big Family Games

[mattturner]

Animations were phenomenal on this vid

[endybendy]

This is just anti-Prototype propaganda!

[spinballwhizzkids]

I think the problem lies more with wastage from retailers than with consumers.

How companies like Game cut disks and sever cables continuing to bin them, rather than donating overstock to charitable causes upsets me.

This problem is also prevalent with US companies such as GameStop. Whilst old games still hold a value in regards to nostalgia and backwards compatibility it doesn’t make sense to bin them.

[PortlandMan]

Crazy to think that a bus shelter you're standing under might be made from some of your recycled games

[dusty]

So I went to the CeX website to see how much they were selling Prototype for, expecting it to be somewhere around a tenner. It's a quid, so I can't really make the joke I was going to.

[atfruitbat]

Good topic! Interesting to see what happens to these material objects. It's encouraging to see a shift towards sustainable materials in manufacturing. Plus a paper/cardboard case takes up less shelf space, which is handy at home. If you can't recycle the plastic case in your area, some charity shops will happily take them off your hands, because they can house stray DVDs or Blu-rays in those spare boxes.

[nienke]

Reuse is always better than recycle, so if someone wants to buy it second hand, that's better, and those plastic boxes could potentially also be used to package new discs (game or otherwise)

[neenaw]

I didn’t expect a football game to pioneer environmentally friendly game packaging 😲 big up to Miles from Sports Interactive 👏🏾

[chadmichael]

If you break something down and attempt to recycle it, to remake the same product, there WILL be waste. If they took what they called waste, and made it into another product, there would be no waste. For example, I used to work in a high tech computer chip manufacturing plant. And the waste that would be vented off to the atmosphere, and then the company just pays EPA fines. A company I worked for, took that gas that would be vented, and developed a process that refined it, collected it, pressed it, and created fire resistant dry wall type of building materials. This material is then sold, and all waste for this process IS need to think out of the box these days. And there are plenty of room left for innovations in ALL aspects of our industries, across the world. There isn't any company that I couldnt go into, and figure out a way or means, to gain profits from perceived wastes. More people are needed with this

[captain_rewind]

THANK YOU for this, truly. It’s so awesome that you were led to some of these interviews. It’s funny how a lot of people don’t know how doing just basic journalism can sometimes quickly lead you to interviews you never imagined getting!

[JoeWalker]

Love the wall-e lift truck in the recycling company

[KarolaTea]

Huh, I had never heard of that scrunch test! And now I wonder what kind of plastic pops back flat...

Really interesting video, thank you!
Also a point on the plastic vs. paper thing: We can't recycle things indefinitely, at some point the material degrades. Not much of a problem with paper, trees grow back. But plastic (as of now) is made from mineral oil, which will run out at some point (and also getting it out of the ground/shipping it around the globe is quite destructive).

[Alex-nlcy]

The latest episode of the podcast Reasonably Sound "The World Remade" talks about the environmental cost of different music formats, including disks and streaming. I'd highly recommend it.

[davidwebb]

Surely the best solution would be to make digital copies of games the same price or cheaper than physical copies (as they should be) and allow them to be sold on a 2nd hand market. Then physical copies would be obsolete and the waste would be zero.

[nuksnipr]

The team at Football Manager, just wow. I love the guts to say "We are doing this" and props to SEGA for going along. I'd love to see more of this.