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Funny thing..last night on NUMB3RS, someone had a student repair her CD player and he ended up frying a CD. This afternoon I found what looked like a partially melted CD on my lawn. Hmmmm! dl Mal Rockwell wrote: > Tin snips work well for cutting them up. > But something more permanent, like burning them, is probably a major > environmental hazard. I know I wouldn't want to be breathing anywhere > around them while they're on fire! > It'd be nice if a random signal could be burned over existing data, thus > making it unreadable, but I don't think that can be done easily. > Still, if you just want to throw them away where do you throw them? > Now to read other contributors answers... > Mal > > ******* > > Trey Bunn wrote: > >> This may be an odd question considering that it's pretty much the >> opposite of what most of us normally do, but I was wondering if anyone >> had any tips on how to destroy a CD-R. Say, for example, you had a CD >> (data or audio) with sensitive material on it that you didn't want to >> just throw in the trash and hope that no one ever found it and played >> it. Yes, I know that ending up in a landfill wouldn't do it any good, >> but that wouldn't necessarily make it unplayable. I'm reminded of a >> huge lot of cassettes that my brother and I found in a dump around >> 1980 that we took home to record over, and we found that they were >> recordings of some kind of courtroom cases, probably stuff we never >> should have heard. We were too young to be interested in them and >> just recorded over them (I still have some of those same tapes, and >> yes, they still play), but still, whoever just chucked them in the >> trash was being rather sloppy, I'd think. >> >> So anyway, back to the CD problem. Last night I tried to break one in >> half, thinking that since it was plastic, it would snap in two if bent >> hard enough, but no. The thing was nearly impossible to break. I >> tried using a cabinet door for leverage, but that still didn't bend it >> enough to break. I did manage to warp the surface and the inner gold >> layer enough that its data probably wouldn't be recoverable, but the >> more trouble it gave me, the more I began to wonder if any of you guys >> out there had a specific procedure in place for getting rid of CDs >> other than just chucking them. I also tried cutting it in half with >> some needle-nose pliers and taking a lighter to the writeable surface, >> and while this did some damage, it still wasn't what I'd consider the >> data equivalent of using a paper shredder. Certainly not efficient or >> easy, either. >> >> Any thoughts? And no, before anyone thinks I have a CD full of super >> secret scary government files or something, don't worry. It was just >> a back-up of personal correspondence and journal entries that I didn't >> need anymore (I made a more updated back-up). I know this isn't >> specifically a recorded sound-related question, but it could be, you >> know, if one were to have a recording on CD-R like the ones I >> described above. >> >