The earth911 website seems to have cornered the niche for referrals to local recycling centers. It does a good job of returning localized results, but does not do a good job of sorting the results by what percentage or kind of recycling is done. Many of the results for my local search were for operations that only cater to government or business, charities that either resell or give away things, or disposal services that don't actually do any recycling (in my case they just toss the cassettes into a shredder, which admittedly at least reduces their landfill footprint). It is good that all these options are gathered together by location and type of material, but the only way to figuring out which one to select is to manually read through each description to find out how it applies.
earth911's search tool: http://search.earth911.com/
Here are a variety of links describing the dilemma of trying to recycle VHS tapes:
http://earth911.com/eco-tech/the-vhs-and-cassette-tape-recycling-dilemma/
http://www.greencitizen.com/how-to-recycle-vhs-tapes/
http://earth911.com/recycling-guide/how-to-recycle-cds-tapes/
Interestingly, from the comments to these articles, there are a few interesting but generally unrelated things that can be learned:
"Green Citizen" is only in Berkeley San Francisco only. They charge 10 cents a tape which is an awesome deal.http://greencitizen.com/berkeley_computer_electronic_recycling_center.php
An Oreo Separator Machine is a thing which exists. https://biggeekdad.com/2013/03/oreo-separator-machine/
Green Citizen used to ship the tapes to Sims Metal Management which probably just shredded them. Then that "downstream processor" folded and now Green Citizen doesn't even take tapes anymore.
Toronto has a dedicated recycling service for VHS tapes. They fully dismantle components for renewal usage!!! For some reason, this hasn't spread to anywhere else, why? http://www.ProjectGetReel.com
GetReel is part of a larger collective called Red Propeller which interestingly enough also recycles child safety car seats. They charge 40 cents/tape, which is still a fair deal. https://www.redpropeller.ca/getreel
One possible solution to processing the coated mylar tape is Thermal Depolymerization (TDP). This would produce a light crude oil, and separate out the coating for potential further processing. It's perhaps not the best solution in terms of recycling since it produces basically a one use product, but could be very useful in terms isolating the potentially environmentally hazardous material. And I have heard of research into changing the resulting products of TDP that may be able to produce more monomers instead of just a fuel product.
Not at all unrelated, there appears to be a recycling company that lets you mail stuff to them. So far looking at their site it seems like the price structure looks reasonable. http://www.greendisk.com/
Results returned from my earth911 search:
Securis has many offices in the Maryland area including one right in town. The search result showed they accept residential dropoff but they are obviously an IT disposal business that caters mostly to big clients and promise no more than to shred videotapes.
http://securisfortmeade.com/
The lovely-named TurtleWings is an electronics disposal company in DC that seems to be better focused on doing good than most. earth911 claimed they do residential including videotapes, but their site doesn't mention either of these directly. https://turtlewings.com/
"Savers" near Towson is a charity distribution center that earth911 claims takes VHS tapes but they also promise to just throw out things out that aren't resellable. http://search.earth911.com/location/Q1RQNVRcXllAUQ/?what=VHS+Tapes&where=201234&max_distance=25&country=US&province=MD&city=Laurel®ion=Howard&postal_code=20723&latitude=39.129694252223&longitude=-76.855985681053&sponsor=&list_filter=all
The earth911 info page for Advanced Med IT promises that they will take all kinds of stuff from both residential and business, however their site makes it clear that they really just cater to businesses. http://www.amitrecycling.com/
