Hey Friend,
One of the maintenance tasks that all guitarists face is changing out your strings. The more you play your guitar, the more often you should change your strings.
Why?
Over usage and time, strings start to lose their tonal qualities. As that happens, they begin to sound dull.
Even if you put your guitar in a corner and didn’t touch it for weeks on end (what?!?!), your strings will deteriorate.
Between moisture in the air, dust and temperature fluctuations, sweat and oils from your skin, dead skin cells, stretching and you whipping them with a pick, guitar strings take a lot of abuse.
Now think about professional guitar players. They can go through multiple packs of strings a day!
In the studio, it’s not uncommon to change strings between every recorded track. And when a band is on tour, each guitar used could have its strings changed out before every gig.
So what happens to all those guitar strings?
Straight into the trash, which means the landfill where they sit and rust for years.
It always bothered me that I couldn’t throw them into our city recycling bin. Municipalities don’t allow guitar strings to be recycled.
Now I’m not a militant environmentalist, but I definitely hate seeing things go to waste. If something can be reused or re-purposed, I’m all for it.
Imagine this: They’ve estimated that upwards of 1.5 million lbs. of instrument strings could go into landfills every year. A pound of guitar strings equals 28 sets, so we’re talking like a bazillion sets of strings every year!
Our guitars give us a lot of satisfaction, and here’s our chance to do something good for the environment. We all live on this ball of mud, and we do need to take care of it.
Let’s turn these strings into something useful instead of letting them rot!
Use this site for a map of locations where you can drop off your dead strings in the US. Guitar Center and Sam Ash are part of the program, as well as many local music shops. And if your local guitar store isn’t on the map, consider telling them about the program so they can do their part, too. Happy Friday!
Peace~
Dave
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