August 2009    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 24, No. 8   What's this?

Recycling Your Old Dive Equipment

for divers with worn-out gear, it’s not easy being green

from the August, 2009 issue of Undercurrent  

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We recently got a letter from reader Suzanne Rose (Natick, MA), asking us how she can “retire” her old, worn-out scuba gear. “Such as the wetsuit that has completely fallen apart. I did once ask a rep at a dive show rep about this. He said I could mail my worn-out wetsuit to the company and that they’d ‘take care of it.’ He didn’t seem sure as to what exactly they would do with it so, worried that they would just throw it away, I never sent it to them. But I don’t want to throw it in the trash and have it wind up in a landfill, as I suspect it takes a long time for neoprene to disintegrate.”

After interviewing dive shops, gear manufacturers and recycling experts, we concluded there isn’t a simple way yet to recycle dive gear. Some types of equipment are easier to recycle than others - - but it’s up to the diver to make the effort getting it to the most eco-friendly place.

The best bet for eco-friendly disposal is to first contact the manufacturer - - many are putting together recycling programs for their gear. While some companies will take them back for free, others require you to upgrade to a newer product before they’ll recycle. The gear easiest for them to recycle are BCDs, regulators, dive computers and instruments. Mark Lane in Oceanic and Aeris’s customer service department says his company has a trade-in program for those products for customers who upgrade to newer models. The metals used in those products are stripped out, and the company used them in the creation of new gear....