If you were around in the 80s, you probably remember a time when vinyl was one of the only ways you could listen to music, outside of a radio.

Then cassette players happened, followed by compact discs, then iPods, then streaming…and here we are.

Accessing music is easier than ever, but a couple of years ago, people started yearning for the tactile experience of interacting with a record, and the vinyl revival was born.

Did I mention that the sound is just so much better on vinyl? Like, there’s no comparison. It’s just so much better.

Anyway, as record sales reached a new all-time high, more artists started pressing their albums in vinyl, and the industry was revived.

If you’d like to know how vinyl is pressed, here’s a video:

If you were listening to that backing track on vinyl it would sound so much better.

Also, that’s not the whole story.

Over to the Guardian for the dark side of the vinyl revival:

While vinyl pellets are shipped in large boxes, it takes only a handful to make a typical record. US–based petrochemical corporations supplied much of this raw material until the LP market dried up after 1990 and, consequently, the US supply chain evaporated.

Nowadays, with the stylus back in style, the ingredients of LPs are manufactured offshore. More than half of the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) used by today’s US record manufacturers comes from the Thai Plastic and Chemicals Public Company Limited (TPC), which has its headquarters in Bangkok.

TPC is not the most environmentally friendly organisation, evidenced in how they dispose of their waste.

PVC contains carcinogenic chemicals, and the operation produces toxic wastewater that the company has been known to pour into the Chao Phraya River according to Greenpeace, which says TPC has “a history of environmental abuses” going back to the early 1990s.

You can read the full article to really get to grips with the impact of vinyl production on the planet, but here’s the long and short of it:

Vinyl records, as well as cassettes and CDs, are oil products that have been made and destroyed by the billion since the mid-20th century. During the US sales peaks of the LP, cassette and CD, the US recording industry was using almost 60m kilos of plastic a year.

Using contemporary averages on greenhouse gas equivalent releases per pound of plastic production, as well as standard weight figures for each of the formats, that is equivalent to more than 140m kilos of greenhouse gas emissions each year, in the US alone.

Music, like pretty much everything else, is caught up in petro-capitalism.

If you think you’ve been making up for it by using a cotton tote bag for your groceries, I’m sorry to say those aren’t great for the environment, either.

The good news is that a lot of companies are looking into greener ways to make records. There’s also nothing wrong with thrifting some secondhand records to get your music fix.

Because, jokes aside, it really does sound better.

[source:guardian]