Donate CDs in Albuquerque

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

The crate of CDs left over from going digital

There is a specific kind of CD collection I see constantly. It belonged to someone who actually cared about music — who bought albums the week they came out, kept the booklets, organized the binder. Then the switch happened. First the discs got ripped to iTunes or a hard drive. Then the hard drive stopped mattering because streaming arrived. And the physical CDs, the ones that started it all, became a stack of plastic that nobody had a reason to open.

That stack is awkward in a way books are not. A CD collection is heavy. It is a lot of small, hard cases that do not pack well and do not stack neatly. It survives moves not because anyone wants it but because dealing with it is always lower priority than everything else. So it goes from the shelf to a closet to the garage, and the question of what to actually do with it never gets answered.

The honest answer for most people has been: nothing. The discs sit. Or, eventually, somebody fills a trash bag with them — which, as the recycling section below explains, sends them straight to the landfill. Neither of those is a good outcome for media that still plays perfectly well and that other people would happily listen to.

That is the gap the New Mexico Literacy Project fills. I am a one-person operation run by Josh Eldred out of a warehouse at 5445 Edith Blvd NE in the North Valley. I built the business on books and free book pickups, and CDs followed naturally — because the boxes people hand me are almost never just books. They are books and CDs together. So I take the CDs, by exactly the same rules: free pickup, 24/7 drop box, any condition, no sorting. This page covers how that works and what happens to the discs afterward.

The honest hook: a CD in the trash goes to the landfill

Here is the thing most people do not know when they finally decide to clear out a CD collection. A compact disc is not a single material. It is a layer of polycarbonate plastic with a thin reflective coating of aluminum bonded inside it, plus dyes, lacquer and a printed label. That layered, mixed-material build is precisely what makes it impossible to recycle the ordinary way.

CDs are not accepted in Albuquerque curbside recycling. There are two reasons. First, the discs are small, flat and rigid — they fall through the screens or jam the sorting equipment at the recycling facility. Second, even if a disc made it through, a standard recycling line cannot separate the polycarbonate from the bonded aluminum layer. So a CD that goes in the curbside bin does not get recycled; at best it gets pulled out as a contaminant, and at worst it damages equipment.

Which means a CD in the trash bag goes to the landfill. There are specialized recyclers that can process optical discs — they shred the discs and mechanically separate the polycarbonate so it can be reused — but they generally operate through mail-in programs that almost nobody is going to chase down for a closet's worth of old albums.

So the simplest case for donating instead of trashing is this: do not put your CDs in the garbage. If a disc plays, it is still music somebody can enjoy. If it does not, it should reach a recycler that can actually process polycarbonate, not a landfill. When you hand the collection to NMLP, I make both of those things happen — and you do not have to think about it again.

Two ways to donate your CDs

The whole service is built around convenience. Pick whichever of these fits.

No minimum either way. A grocery bag of CDs or a full estate music library — both get handled. And no sorting: if your CDs are mixed in with DVDs, books, tapes or games, leave them mixed. I separate everything at the warehouse. See what I accept for the complete list of what can ride along in the same donation, and the donate page if books are the main thing you are clearing.