Chip in against global warming, download legally!

Posted on Jun 14, 20:25 PM

Have you ever wondered what the environmental footprint is of listening to music on a carrier such as a CD ? No? Well the following piece of writing - although hypothetical - gives you an insight into this topic.
In these times of growing awareness concerning the effect of human behaviour on our environment following the recent film “ An Inconvenient Truth ”, in which Al Gore presents us with the naked facts about global warming we are facing as the human race, we from The WAB couldn’t resist in doing the right thing , which is - by coincidence - convincing you to follow our thing from a totaly new perspective : downloading music from your favourite artists legally is not only the most economical , but even the most ecological way to enjoy music!
Where do we begin?
First of all , what are the pollutive elements we can discern as we focus on the compact disc? A short list enlightens us , and it is more than meets the eye at first !
1. The plastic of the CD itself
2. The Plastic of the Jewel Box
3. The luxury paperbooklet
4. The processing of the paper to get it’s full glossy coloured result
5. Fuel used by diverse transport media to ship the CD’s from Company to customer

As we know by now , global warming is caused by pumping CO2 into our atmosphere, and this is primarily done in two ways:
A.Burning fossile fuels ( i.e. Oil and coals, only the former applies to the CD )
B. Cutting down our ever diminishig forrests, which acts like our planet’s lungs , sucking in CO2, and releasing oxygen.
Finding right figures for usage of resources is a tricky business, but according to papers found on Google scholar, the following stats shouldn’t be too far off..
By producing CD’s we use approximately 50 grams of Oil per CD, for the disc and jewelcase alone. More so , the transport of these plastic carriers using trucks for short and intermediate distance and planes for long distance should result in an average of another 50 grams of oil per CD, which leaves us with about 100 grams, give or take.
For the booklets and other casing options, we need paper and cardboard , all made of premium quality paper, primarily using freshly cut trees.
The next question is how many booklets can we make from one tree?
Searching the internet I found quite an interresting statistics page run by Conservatree with the following figures :
1 ton of copier paper (not even near the quality of a booklet ) uses 12 trees and contains 8333 sheets. For 1 ton of uncoated virgin printing paper (more our kind of thing) we’ll need 24 Trees ...With an average booklet of 5 pages , we use about 3 sheets of A4 paper every booklet, so we can make about 2700 booklets for 24 trees or about 1100 booklets a tree, considering the cardbord casings found in many cd covers nowadays.
So Now we have the figures , let’s add them up...
100 grams of oil/ CD
1100 booklets / tree

Taking into account the figures released by the IFPI

Sales 2005: $US21 Billion (physical and digital ) in record companies’ trade revenues,
With only 5% digital sales !
Wholesales price approx: $ 7/ unit
Actual sales in copies : 3 billion cd’s (this is not even the amount which was produced and shipped, for there are stocks everywhere)

Multipliyng these figures we come to a staggering result:
The 2005 sales amounted in:
300 billion grams of oil = +/- 300 million liters of oil
And 2.727.727 trees were cut down for the sake of a booklet. To put it more visualy, ecoworld recons about 25 trees per square acre and 16.000 trees per square mile, which means a surface of about 170 square miles , let’s say 4 times the surface of a major city the likes of Amsterdam
And these figures are added up every year!
So before you go out and buy the music you like on CD, please consider there is an option to your desire which keeps our planet a place where tomorrow, you can still enjoy the music you’ve purchased.
....We rest our case .....for now
The WAB Team