There was a time when packing for a vacation meant piling all of your CDs into giant three ring binders and hauling them around with you from city to city for fear of needing to hear a certain song and not having brought that particular album. Luckily, the advent of the iPod has meant that lugging twenty pounds of music in your suitcase is no longer necessary, even for the most dedicated music lovers. But what happens to all those once beloved compact discs?

It is a question that each of us likely has our own answer to – many have been given away, some stored, plenty tossed into the garbage. But thanks to IT manufacturer, Fujitsu, old CDs and DVDs are being given a second life as laptop computers. The Japanese has created the industry’s first recycling system to reuse these plastics in electronic notebook manufacturing.

At five recycling centers across Japan, Fujitsu processes the remnants of outdated technology through a system expected to reduce CO2 emissions by 15 percent. Developing the system to do this has not been easy. From the company:

Firstly, when different types of plastic are involved, a uniform mixture is impossible to achieve even by melting the plastic with heat. As a result, it is necessary to collect only a single type of plastic to ensure the desired material properties. Even so, in a given plastic, there may be differences in ingredients, visual defects, or impurities that make it difficult to achieve the same molding characteristics, colors, strength and other properties as conventional plastics. Furthermore, compliance with the RoHS directive and REACH regulations regarding the safety of chemicals in ICT products has made it challenging to control the quality of recycled plastics, and until now it has been impossible to reuse recovered plastic in a computer bodies.

After a summer of record-breaking temperatures, it is becoming ever clearer that individuals and corporations alike need to consider the impact of our activities on the earth. More innovative solutions like Fujitsu’s are the way forward.

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