MP3 Player Vs. CD Player: Which is Greener?

Did you know that having an MP3 player is a “Green” Lifestyle choice?

I was surprised to learn this. Apparently, according to It’s Easy Being Green, if you download music rather than buy CDs, you are already making a “greener” lifestyle choice…even if you are only doing it some of the time. It’s still better than the alternative.

CD-Roms and DVDs are made of polycarbonate plastic which is not biodegradable. Think about all of those CDs that came to your house as advertisements in the last 10 or 15 years (ahem - AOL) and you just tossed them — me too. Now they’re sitting in landfills not breaking down and blocking out the sun from other things that need it to break down. Or worse, chemicals just melting and sizzling and poisoning our planet.

I feel so much better about my iPod Mini purchase now. And so thankful for Netflix. I kind of felt privileged to have both; now I feel like I’m doing my little part to conserve. I don’t buy CDs anymore and rarely buy a DVD and only then if it’s something I know I want to keep and watch again and again. With Netflix, I’m even conserving gasoline since I’m not driving to and from the video store to see if they have what I want.

So far, I haven’t found a good way to recycle CDs or DVDs other than passing them on to other people who can use them if they’re store-bought music or movies. However, I did find these suggestions for reusing those CDs that come to your house whether you want them or not:

• Use for household decorations using scissors and paint
• Use them as drink coasters by glueing them onto cork wood
• Place the CD under large pillar candles to catch the wax
• Hang CDs in the garden to scare away birds from fruits etc.
• Use as reflectors on fenceposts, driveways etc.
• Use as garden row markers for vegetables, glueing them onto marker posts
• Sell used CD’s or DVD’s to a secondhand shop or donate them to charities

Try also About.com’s CD Trash to Treasure Family Craft website or CD Art.

tags: recycle, green living, CD-rom, DVD, biodegradable, landfill, crafts, iPod

One comment

1. on January 13, 2007 at 10:03 pm

   Laughing Muse said:

   While I understand that CDs aren’t biodegradeable, I will continue to buy CDs. That way, I have high-quality versions of the songs that I can listen to on my home stereo, re-burn at higher quality, or what have you. Buying the MP3s straight off of the web…dunno. For some songs that might be okay; but for others, I want a longer-lived version. (This is the same twisted logic that saw me buying vinyl instead of cassettes: after all, I could record my own cassettes, and go back to the vinyl when the cassettes wore out. Also, MP3 is a lossy compression scheme - which means that each time it’s transferred, possibly even played, it loses an infinitesimal amount of data, leading to degradation over time.

   …and I will Shut Up Now.

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