Destroying CDs and DVDs with nail polish remover.

 

Get rid of your old CDs and DVDs in a hurry with my proven
technique :)

Soak them for 24 hours in nail polish remover.  Keep the container
with a lid on it so that the nail polish remover doesn't evaporate and
you can reuse it over and over again.  Let them dry for about 24
hours.  The nail polish remover eats the plastic. They will warp and
become as brittle as a cracker.

 

On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:51:24 -0700 (PDT), dos-man


24 hours to soak and then 24  hours to dry doesn't seem very
fast, you can break them in half immediately or put them in
a microwave oven and see a light show for the couple seconds
it takes to destroy them.

 Typical discs are made of polycarbonate IIRC, which doesn't
dissolve in the typical acetone solvent in nail polish
remover.  Are your discs a different material or the nail
polish remover a different formulation?  Then again I have
not soaked polycarbonate for 24 hours, maybe it's the length
of time that matters?
 
The coating over the metal might degrade, I don't know it's
formulation, then the unprotected metal might oxidize
rendering it incapable of being read due to deformation of
the pits but I don't know if it would happen sufficiently in
24 hours.

 

kony wrote:

Right you are. Acetone would probably work to dissolve the lacquer coating
from the label side of a CD and that might eventually destroy it but I
don't see a DVD being affected much since it is a polycarbonate sandwich
structure with the  reflective coating internal. Far easier to pop either
type of disk into the microwave, set it for 10 seconds and press START.
Nobody in the world will be able to recover anything after that. Of course
now that I have a heavy-duty confetti shredder I can simply pop either sort
of disk into that and it is gone. Not as much fun as the microwave but at
least I don't have to walk to the kitchen to use it.


--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com

 

John McGaw wrote:

no way am I going to breathe in those harmful fumes

as Kony said: it takes a just a second to break them

 


Well, I don't keep the container anywhere where the fumes are a
problem. I actually hide the container in the garage while they
"soak". And there's a tight lid on the container, so the stuff does
not evaporate. It's only a small container.  I do them in batches of
25 :)