Remember the old days when soft drinks came in glass bottles? After the drink was gone, you could return the bottle to the store and get a few cents back. When you were young, you might have collected a handful of bottles and returned them to a store to get your “reward”: three bottles returned = one free Popsicle; five bottles returned = one free chocolate bar.
What do you do with old compact flash memory cards – 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, etc?
Wouldn’t it be great if a manufacturer like Sandisk or Lexar had some sort of return program? For example, you send back a number of smaller cards and you get a large capacity card at a discounted price. But I guess with the cost of memory cards so low, this isn’t worth the trouble.
How about this: for every GB of memory returned to the card’s manufacturer, the company donates $1 to a charity.
What if a camera store allowed you to pay for purchases with old memory cards, say $2/GB? You could trade old memory for new. This might encourage people to upgrade their cards.
This isn’t about the money but rather it’s about recycling or reusing old memory cards rather than throwing them in the garbage. Many photographers have a collection of old cards that originally cost them thousands of dollars and which are pretty much useless to them today. Too much old, but still somewhat useful, technology goes into the garbage.
Is there a charity or other organization that takes old memory cards?
(From Aaron Johnson’s comic strip What The Duck.)
