Sunday, July 04, 2021

Change the record

At the start of last year, the conversation around sustainability within the music industry was very much focused on the environmental impact of live music. Little did we know then that the pandemic would soon solve that problem, at least for the time being.

As the BBC's Jon Donnison has reported, attention is also being paid to the impact of physical products - in particular vinyl, which is continuing to boom in popularity. As with Lego, the search is on for alternative, more environmentally friendly materials. One possible option is to use waste plastic from the sea, but it's currently a complex and expensive process and so cannot yet be scaled up for mass production. In the meantime, lighter-weight pressings are surely an easy step in the right direction.

However, Donnison makes the very valid point that records are not seen as disposable, even less so than Lego - on the contrary, they're collected, cherished and often handed down or passed on, so far less of a problem than single-use plastics in food packaging. He also points out that streaming, which intuitively seems to be a greener alternative because it involves no physical product, is actually not without environmental impacts of its own - primarily the energy required to cool the servers on which music is stored.

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