making good use of useless CDs

Compact discs.

What a great innovation in music recording and data storage. Cheap to manufacture, easy to use, fairly durable (don't let the new puppy get hold of it), and long lived. As a matter of fact the materials they use are so durable, they may be around a hundred or more years after their useful life!

Stick that in your Greco-Roman Artifact and smoke it.

Because they are a mix of plastic and metal they cannot be recycled for materials, at least not efficiently or cost effectively. This is a job for direct recycling.

Where do they all come from?!

If you own a computer, or have owned several over the years like we have, chances are you have more than just a few CDs sitting around. Likewise, if you have a music collection, there are some discs that you just never listen to anymore.
Look familiar? You may even have some CDs that you received in the mail from a certain nation-wide Internet service provider (you know who we mean).

So anyway, we started giving it some thought. What could we possibly do with all of this DisClutter®©™ we'd accumulated over the years? Flying discs a'la Frisbees? Wallcovering? Disco lighting? (sorry, probably could have skipped that one) None of those really tripped our trigger.

Here is a list of other stuff we thought up.

possible uses for old CDs
(and why they didn't work for us):

• Skeet shooting target (if you miss you can always claim the shot went through the hole, single file). Not a Green solution.
• Use several to compensate for that short leg on the dining room table. This one tended to blind the dinner guests at certain times of day.
• Use one (shiny side out) as the iris and pupil for that giant portrait of Jimi Hendrix that we've always wanted to do for the office. Would have detracted from the 'Busy American Stuffalanche' decor, besides, it only used up one.
• Embed a bunch in resin on the top of your wife's heirloom coffee table (okay, that wasn't such a hot idea was it?)
• Make a mobile, a really big one. Ceilings too low and the local mall's management laughed at us when we asked.

After all of that, we looked at our desks and noticed what we had been setting our coffee mugs on for the last five years. There it was, but not quite right, it needed some refinement. Plug that hole and give it a better backing.

There you have it, the origins of the CDCoaster, right in front of us, promising 100 free hours, and totally right.

An Addendum

Although we did think of doing something like it, we just couldn't see much point in The Hammerhead. It didn't really use any CDs, just spread them out a bit, and besides that, we'd have probably hurt ourselves.