Nightmares On Wax
Hi everyone!!
In my last blog post, I did a brief overview on the different formats of music and compared them in terms of their environmental impact. In the next few blog posts, I will be zooming in on one specific format of music, Vinyl.
The return of vinyl in the last decade is seen as one of the most surprising comebacks of the digital age. Vinyl first came into the market in the 1930s, when RCA Victor launched the first commercially available vinyl long playing record and was a very popular format of music up until the 1960s. At this time the vinyl industry largely discontinued production of conventional LP records and equipment as new up and upcoming music formats such as compact discs (CDs) were coming into play.
While this comeback may be great for the vinyl community, it does carry with it some major environmental impacts. Not only is the vinyl itself made of the most environmentally damaging plastic (PVC), but the entire production process of vinyl causes major negative impacts to our environment.
Vinyl Pressing Process:
The 3 main processes in the making of vinyl are the cutting process, plating process and pressing process, all of which require the use of many heavy duty machines. Traditionally, the machines used to press vinyl are powered by steam boilers that require the burning of fossil fuels to generate heat and pressure. Adding on to that, these machines have to be maintained using water that is treated with anti-corrosive chemicals in order to prevent rusting. Therefore, not only is there a large environmental impact in terms of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, there is also a lot of wastewater produced in the process.
It may be hard for you to understand the entire production process just based on the image above, so here is a video explaining the vinyl pressing process:
I would like to pull your attention to a very specific part of the video where he shows us the boiler room (2min 35sec into the video). This boiler room is where the fossil fuels are burnt in order to generate the heat and pressure needed to produce steam that powers the vinyl pressing machines. You can clearly see the flames in the boiler where the burning of fossil fuel occurs as he even points it out in the video. Therefore, this boiler room is one of the main sources of CO2 emissions released through the production process of vinyl.
Believe it or not, the production of 10 million vinyl records leads to the creation of about 5000 tons of CO2, which is the carbon footprint of around 1000 people.
That being said, there have been attempts to try and make the production process of vinyl more environmentally friendly through the use of newer models of the vinyl pressing machine that do not require the burning of fossil fuels. For example, a pressing plant in Chicago purchased a steam presser, the Vyril machine, that runs without electricity. I will be covering more on this and other attempts to help the production of vinyl move towards being more environmentally friendly in a later blog post, so keep your eye out for that.
I hope this post helped you better understand how the production of vinyl generates large amounts of CO2 emissions that pollute our environment. In my next post I will be focusing on the harmful properties that Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) carries with it and how it causes pollution and is detrimental to our environment.
See you then!
References:
Richter, F. (2020, August 27). Infographic: The Surprising Comeback of Vinyl Records. Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://www.statista.com/chart/7699/lp-sales-in-the-united-states/
History of vinyl records timeline. (1878, January 01). Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-vinyl-records
Kim, M., Pierre, A., Hussey, A., Pitchfork, Monroe, J., & Minsker, E. (n.d.). How the Record Industry Is Trying to Make Vinyl More Environmentally Friendly. Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-the-record-industry-is-trying-to-make-vinyl-more-environmentally-friendly/
Fielding, A. (2020, February 07). Can our vinyl obsession ever be environmentally friendly? Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://djmag.com/longreads/can-our-vinyl-obsession-ever-be-environmentally-friendly