By Emily Wright | From the March/April 2026 issue of Strings

Let’s say you’ve designed a product, and it can, for the purposes of argument, be made from any material in the world: natural, synthetic, some hybrid. Let’s also say you care about the environment and want to factor that into the production choices you make. Petrochemicals are out, so plastics are the first thing you exclude. Trees are the lungs of the planet, so you’re not cutting those down, either—not when there are other choices. What about metal? Your mind flashes to strip mines, visions of giant smelting vats and workers with faces blackened with ash. The creation of new metal manages to be just as grim for the planet as the other materials. What makes metal different is the ease with which it is recycled. Over two thirds of the steel used in the United States comes from recycled scrap, which, unlike plastic or paper, does not experience any degradation in strength or quality in its recycled form. Aluminum and other metals share similar statistics. You build and rebuild your metal prototype until it’s just right, sending each version to the scrap heap with the knowledge that the next batch might even have some measure of your previous attempt within, just as strong and reliable as ever.

In the realm of stringed instruments, opportunities to demonstrate better stewardship of the natural world seem slim at first glance, as so much of what players traditionally use comes at a heavy environmental cost: rare wood; silver and gold; animal hides, tusks, and hair; and plastics aplenty, to skim the surface. It is decidedly problematic for the ecologically inclined, and as is so often the case in the United States, the focus tends to be on consumers making better choices. Try plant-based bow hair! Buy a recycled case! But some companies are structuring environmental awareness into their mission, and one such manufacturer stepping up on that front is D’Addario, the world’s largest producer of strings. Together with eco-juggernaut TerraCycle, they’re trying to prevent the strings we require to create art from further imperiling the earth.

TerraCycle is in the business of landfill diversion, creative reuse, and upcycling, as well as the more classic standard recycling model. While it processes materials for recycling, it does not manufacture products itn-house. Instead, it serves as a facilitator, selling the resulting materials to companies that would otherwise have to use a less sustainable option. Most Americans will have encountered one of TerraCycle’s affiliate programs in any number of retail spaces, most notably plastic bag recycling in grocery stores. 

In 2016, TerraCycle teamed up with D’Addario to create the Playback Free Recycling Program in the United States, which takes strings of every origin and processes them into raw materials for reuse. The majority of strings the company receives are nylon, from classical and flamenco guitars. Modern viol family strings tend to be composed of a mixture of materials: metals like steel, chromium, silver, gold, and tungsten are frequently wrapped around a synthetic core. These synthetics have names like perlon or stabilon, proprietary names for different varieties of nylon. 

It is still true that polymers like nylon are dastardly, but what are the alternatives? A wholesale return to gut strings is unlikely for every possible reason. And tossing them in the garbage gives those nylon cores a chance to decompose into microplastics over the course of 30–40 years, choking or poisoning wildlife in landfills and bodies of water. Recycling them back into strings runs into plastic’s primary issue: the molecular bonds reform in unpredictable ways, damaging the tensile strength and overall consistency. Thus TerraCycle’s process melts and separates the metal components, but the synthetic bits disappear in a cloud of smoke, literally: the high temperatures vaporize the plastic. The metals, once separated, return to the marketplace, good as new.

There is a reason D’Addario is spearheading this initiative: They’re the only string maker with the money and manpower to do it, located in a country that is well behind other nations that track recycling participation and efficiency. This is where it’s needed most, and a key factor in assessing sustainability is location. Any environmental benefit to an international program like this would be mitigated by the carbon-laden logistics of shipping them elsewhere. In fact, the sheer size of the United States makes the bulk requirements imposed vital. Every Music & Arts location has giant collection bins and sends them off only when absolutely brimming. Individuals are required to send five pounds or more at a time. Each collection envelope comes prepaid, with D’Addario footing the bill at every step. If free postage isn’t incentive enough, D’Addario rewards participants with credits for every quarter of a pound of strings it receives via its Players Circle. In effect, recycling your old strings can help pay for a new set, as well as preventing valuable scrap metal from corroding uselessly at the dump. 

2026 marks the tenth anniversary of the Playback initiative, an excellent step in the right direction. The question is: What’s next?

Recycling is an umbrella term describing the process of diverting waste from the refuse stream and turning it into new products. Upcycling refers to taking byproducts or other “useless” materials and repurposing them. What we now know as gasoline, for instance, was formerly discarded as a byproduct of refining crude oil into kerosene for lamps. Gasoline is technically an upcycled product, though not sustainable. Downcycling is on the other side of the spectrum, and most common with plastics. The material is usable after recycling but does not retain enough of its original properties to create the same product again.

TerraCycle estimates that 1.5 million pounds (nearly 700 metric tons) of strings go into US landfills each year. Their unusual shape and mix of materials make them impossible to recycle via traditional municipal programs. More than 16 million strings have been collected and recycled through D’Addario’s ten-year collaboration with TerraCycle. —EW