75 years of the LP: For love of the world, should you own or stream?

Streaming generates more emissions than any other format, for an interesting reason: We listen more, when we listen online. See how else the formats stack up.

There’s one aspect of vinyl’s longevity and resurgence that poses a concern.

The PVC pellets used to make vinyl records. The average record contains 135 gm of PVC, and is responsible for the release of about 0.5 kg of carbon dioxide. That’s about the same as driving 2.5 km in a car fuelled by petroleum. (Getty Images)

Polyvinyl chloride or PVC — the material used to make vinyl — is a hard-to-recycle plastic. Production methods involve the release of toxic chlorine-based chemicals.

Greenpeace once called PVC the world’s “most environmentally damaging plastic”.

So, how bad is the LP or long-playing record, from an ecological standpoint?

According to researchers at Keele University, in an article published on the university website in 2019, the average vinyl record contains about 135 gm of PVC, and is responsible for the release of about 0.5 kg of carbon dioxide. That’s about the same as driving about 2.5 km in a car fuelled by petroleum.

With 41 million vinyl records sold in 2022 in the US alone, that’s quite a lot of emissions (and this is before we get to the carbon footprint of the packaging and transit).

Now, streaming is certainly less energy-intensive and carbon-intensive, in a one-on-one comparison. But the server farms that enable users to access the world’s shared music libraries run on energy. Lots of it. And most of it draws from coal and other non-renewable sources.

The Keele University researchers estimated that streaming an album for 17 hours would involve the same carbon emissions as producing an LP. For CDs, which are made from recyclable plastic, five hours of streaming equals one CD. So, if you listen to your favourite music over and over, opt for a physical format.

Now, that’s a like-for-like comparison. In real terms, streaming has likely generated far more emissions than any other format of music, for an interesting reason: We listen more, when we listen online.

With playlists now just a click away, the barriers of curation, selection, and actual setup and play are gone. As a result, music plays in the background, stays on for longer. The disc doesn’t stop, either; instead, playlists can form an endless loop.

As a result, music-streaming-related greenhouse gas emissions could be as high as 350 million kg a year in the US alone, estimates Kyle Devine, a musicologist with the University of Oslo, in his 2019 book, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. That’s more than twice the annual emissions of the peak CD years (the early 2000s), which were pegged at 134 million kg.

Some fans of the LP have been trying to find eco-friendly ways to press and listen to new music. In 2017, a record pressing plant in the Netherlands called DeepGrooves opened that claimed to use only green biomass energy, no toxic additives, and more efficient production methods, cutting greenhouse emissions significantly.

Another Dutch consortium, Green Vinyl, has re-engineered old CD presses to make vinyl from PET plastic instead of PVC. This could mean that at least a few one-time-use water bottles could be recycled to play music.

Last year, British firm Evolution Music announced that it had created the world’s first bioplastic vinyl record, made without any PVC. This April, Evolution, DeepGrooves and Canadian DJ Blond:ish teamed up to release a limited, 150-copy run of the world’s first biodegradable LP made using bioplastic.

While we wait for such efforts to expand, a good bet for now is to try and own physical formats of the music we cherish, and keep returning to those discs. Vinyl, CD or MP3, anything, the figures would suggest, is better than streaming.