Donate Cassette Tapes in Albuquerque

Last verified June 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

The box of cassettes nobody knows what to do with

There is a specific kind of cassette collection I see constantly. It belonged to someone who lived through the format — who taped albums off the radio, bought tapes at the mall, made and received mixtapes that actually meant something, and drove cars that only had a tape deck. Then CDs arrived, then MP3s, then streaming, and the tapes became a box of small plastic shells that nobody owned a player for anymore.

Cassettes are uniquely stranded. Unlike a book, or even a CD, there is almost nowhere to take them. Goodwill, Savers and the other Albuquerque thrift stores quietly stopped accepting cassettes years ago because they don't move on the shelf. They aren't curbside recyclable. And the people who would actually play them aren't the ones standing in the living room trying to clear out the house. So the box goes from the closet to the garage to the next move, and the question of what to do with it never gets answered.

The honest answer for most people has been: nothing — or, eventually, a trash bag, which (as the recycling section below explains) sends the whole box straight to the landfill. Neither is a good outcome for tapes that often still play fine and that a real, growing community of collectors and listeners would genuinely want.

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 cassettes followed naturally — because the boxes people hand me are almost never just books. So I take the tapes, 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 tapes afterward.

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

Here is what most people don't realize when they finally decide to clear out a box of tapes. A cassette is not one material. It is a plastic shell held together with tiny screws, two spools, metal pins and rollers, a felt pressure pad, and the tape itself — a long ribbon of polyester film coated with a magnetic layer of iron oxide. That mixed-material build is precisely what makes a cassette impossible to recycle the ordinary way.

Cassettes are not accepted in Albuquerque curbside recycling. The shell is the wrong kind of plastic for the bin, the magnetic tape ribbon tangles and contaminates the stream, and the metal parts can't be separated from the plastic and tape on a standard recycling line. A cassette dropped in the curbside bin gets pulled out as a contaminant — there is no municipal path for them at all.

So a cassette in the trash bag goes straight to the landfill, where the plastic and polyester tape will sit essentially forever. There are a few mail-in electronics-and-media recyclers that can handle cassettes, but they generally charge a fee and almost nobody is going to chase one down for a closet box of old tapes.

So the simplest case for donating instead of trashing is this: don't put your cassettes in the garbage. If a tape plays, it is still music or audio somebody wants — and the collector market for cassettes is real and growing. If it doesn't, it should at least reach someone who handles old media responsibly rather than the curbside bin. Hand the box to NMLP and that's what happens — and you don't have to think about it again.

Two ways to donate your cassettes

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

No minimum either way. A shoebox of cassettes or a full estate music library — both get handled. And no sorting: if your cassettes are mixed in with CDs, DVDs, books 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.