Donate DVDs & Blu-rays in Albuquerque

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

The DVD wall that streaming made redundant

A DVD collection used to be something people built deliberately. You bought the movies you loved, picked up the box sets when a series ended, watched the bonus features. The shelf grew year over year until it filled a whole wall of the den. It was, for a while, how a household kept its movies.

Then a streaming subscription arrived, and within a couple of years almost everything on that wall was available on demand without getting up. The discs did not break or wear out — they just stopped being the way anyone watched anything. The wall became furniture: a few hundred plastic cases that take up real space and have not been touched in years.

A DVD or Blu-ray collection is genuinely awkward to deal with. The cases are bigger and bulkier than CDs, so a full collection is heavy and fills a lot of boxes. People notice exactly how much of it there is at two moments: when they pack for a move, and when they clear out a parent's house. Both times, the same question comes up — where does a wall of movies actually go? — and most of the time it does not get answered. The collection moves to a closet, then a garage, and waits.

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 movies followed naturally — the boxes people hand me are rarely just books, they are books and DVDs together. So I take the DVDs too, by the same rules: free pickup, 24/7 drop box, any condition, no sorting. This page explains how that works and what happens to the discs afterward.

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

Here is what most people do not know when they finally decide to clear the movie shelf. A DVD is not a single material. It is made of polycarbonate plastic with a thin reflective layer bonded inside, plus dyes, lacquer and printed labeling. Blu-rays and 4K discs are built the same way. That layered, mixed-material construction is exactly what makes them impossible to recycle the ordinary way.

DVDs and Blu-rays are not accepted in Albuquerque curbside recycling. The discs are flat and rigid, so they jam the sorting equipment at the recycling facility, and a standard recycling line cannot separate the polycarbonate from the bonded reflective layer. A disc dropped in the curbside bin does not get recycled — at best it is pulled out as a contaminant.

Which means a DVD 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 in new products — but they generally work through mail-in programs that almost nobody is going to track down for a closet's worth of old movies.

So the simplest case for donating instead of trashing is this: do not put your DVDs in the garbage. If a disc plays, it is still a movie someone can watch. 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 happen — and you never have to think about that wall again.

Two ways to donate your DVDs

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

No minimum either way. A grocery bag of DVDs or a full home-theater collection — both get handled. And no sorting: if your DVDs are mixed in with CDs, 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.