How the Archives contributes to campus sustainability initiatives

The UT Southwestern Archives goes to great lengths to create sustainability when we deaccession or weed items from our collections. We consider what the item is and then determine the best action of recycling for it. With the help of the Sustainability Coordinator, we identified a company willing to recycle not only VHS, Betamax, and U-Matic tapes but also audiocassettes, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs: this means that we do not send pounds of plastic to the landfill after the materials have been digitized. Additionally, we either donate the books we weed or work to properly recycle the ones that cannot be donated. These are just some of the efforts we make to preserve our planet.