Do not let anyone convince you that your vinyl record collection will kill the planet.
Although recent headlines suggest vinyl production could threaten the environment, natural buying habits and new developments in manufacturing make this issue irrelevant.
It makes sense some would be concerned about the amount of new LPs, given the medium’s meteoric rise in popularity over the last decade.
According to Statista, an online business data platform, in their analysis of a Nielsen report, U.S. vinyl album sales grew for the thirteenth consecutive year in 2018, with 16.8 million LPs sold.
As new records flood the market to meet growing demand, some vinyl lovers expressed environmental concerns about the material used to manufacture LPs.
Chicago electronic producer Benn Jordan recently observed in a blog post titled, “I’m Sorry, But No More Vinyl,” the polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, used to make vinyl records will break down as LPs age, releasing chlorine gas.
Along with pointing out how harmful this material is when left to decompose in landfills, Jordan wrote that PVC is, “Nearly impossible to recycle on a consumer level, and very dangerous and inefficient to recycle on an industrial level.”
The content of vinyl records would not be a concern if LPs decomposed quickly. But PVC is added to records to preserve them and quite effectively too.
According to the Ultimate Classic Rock website, vinyl records left in a landfill could take centuries to decompose under the right conditions and could even leak other hazardous materials like heavy metals and carbon black.
Carbon black can cause adverse effects if ingested orally but the Environmental Protection Agency classifies it as low risk.
These scaremongering warnings assume that a large majority of records now in production will soon be discarded.
As anyone who has parents who collected vinyl records knows, that is simply not the case.
Especially as vinyl grows more and more profitable, the young adults that are discovering records will most likely want to hang on to them for years and could eventually hand them down to future generations.
And for those who do not have relatives or friends to pass their collections onto, the local record shop or online marketplace is a lot more appealing than the dump.
According to Forbes, impressive sales reports documenting vinyl’s boom often do not take used LP sales into account, which are just as massive.
Forbes reported that used vinyl sales from physical retailers, eBay and Discogs roughly match the sales of new vinyl records even without including small local sellers.
Out of my personal collection of 49 vinyl records, only four of them are new.
Like plenty of young people starting to collect records, money is a concern, leading me to sort through clearance bins for older records that I can pick up for only a dollar or two, which keeps LPs out of landfills.
Despite the healthy used market, accelerating production of new LPs would still be a concern if not for promising technology that will make the production of vinyl much more environmentally friendly.
According to a 2016 Discogs blog post, a group of Dutch companies are collaborating on The Green Vinyl Records project, an effort to reduce the costs of LP production by using 65% less energy than traditional vinyl pressing through injection molding.
Green Vinyl Records completely avoids using PVC to create their LPs according to a YouTube video posted by Symcon Group, one of the companies working on the project.
Although vinyl records are made of scary stuff, new production techniques and collector’s natural desire to preserve old records can stop us from poisoning our landfills with discarded vinyl.
You do not have to feel guilty about your collection of vinyl records.
But preserve a bit of history with your collection and avoid bright and shiny represses you will throw away after a year or two.
