If your reasons for going the digital music route is because having a huge collection of digital music is cheaper, and more space efficient than having shelves full of CDs, you would be correct. If you also thought that by not buying CDs, maybe in some way you would be saving the environment because there aren’t actually any physical products in question, you would be correct to a certain extent – or at least until the Cloud music services came along.
Now we all know that Apple has always tried to go green lately by showing how their materials contained no harmful chemicals and were power savers etc., but it looks like Greenpeace does not share the same sentiments, at least not with Apple’s latest server facilities. Their $1 billion cloud computing center in North Carolina will rely heavily on coal, 54.2 percent of their facilities to be exact, and all that power roughly translates to about 80,000 homes in the US, and 250,000 in Europe.
Vinyl on the other hand produces much more environmentally friendly “footprints” according to a recent argument by a vinyl manufacturer – Alpha Music Manufacturing, who has come up with several reasons why going the vinyl route may actually prove to be more “green”.
For starters vinyl has mainly be a collectors item ever since the introduction of the cassette tape and the CD, which means it’s rarely thrown out as collectors usually keep them for their monetary and sentimental values. Album manufacturing companies are also known to shred vinyl that has not been sold and reusing them for other recordings, meaning less vinyl will have to be produced and unlike plastic, vinyl can be broken down better naturally.
While it seems unlikely that the rest of the world will ditch digital music, cloud services and their iPods in favor of vinyl and vinyl players, it’s interesting to note that despite it being a rather old technology, it actually proved itself to be more environmentally friendly.