Instant Survey: Sustainable Media Solutions
by Jeremy McCumber on 10. 3.05
Treehuggers often face internal struggles when it comes to making the greenest, most sustainable choices. One contemporary example is electronic media. With the near unlimited options for getting media on-line from sources like Netflix, Peerflix and iTunes, it seems that our local video and music stores might start suffering. We all want to shop locally and support our community, but what about that fact that the media itself is environmentally unfriendly? Being able to download any CD, DVD, or video game and play it on our computers affords us the ability to completely do away with the wasted paper, plastic and metal required to create that media in the first place. Everyone wants to do their part to support their community and sustainability, so what's a Treehugger to do? As always, we encourage comments below.
Downloading a video is ok but the hardware that is needed to store it on is not entirely enviro. friendly. Just remember the bandwith needed to host the video and then that host needs to increase energy use when people download the movie.
eBay! If you can wait a bit after something comes out, you can find it used, which I'd venture to call recycling of a sort, and probably save a bit'o'green at the same time.
Online distribution, *especially* for video, still has a lot of issues to work out. It will be a long time before I depend on that.
"Downloading a video is ok but the hardware that is needed to store it on is not entirely enviro. friendly. Just remember the bandwith needed to host the video and then that host needs to increase energy use when people download the movie. "
Are people really serious when they make comments of this type? For one thing, if you're commenting about this type of thing on an online forum, you obviously aren't all that terribly concerned about such issues. Also, if you want to look at tech/enviro issues related to entertainment, I'd say enviro/energy issues related to production of media (particularly movies--set construction, energy use, pyrotechnics, etc.) are, at least at this point, still much larger issues than energy consumed in the online distribution of media. Even so, the energy needed for online distribution is certainly a negligible problem comared with those related to the manufacture of cds/dvds/etc...
Make the cds out of corn!
Yeah, I like getting my media from eBay or Half.com. I'm recycling and saving money at once. But I do like things like bittorrent as well. We're already got the hard drive space and the bandwidth, so it's not like we're having to acquire extra for the purpose.
Since the quality of downloadable video is still not up to my personal standards, I still prefer renting/borrowing DVDs to downloading when it comes to film rental. Netflix and (the much older company) Facets Video are the models here.
Otherwise, the minimizing of manufacture and packaging that comes from downloading of software, music, etc, is a very sustainable solution. Especially if you (and your service provider) are buying Green Tags to support your electricity use...
How sustainable my media storage is is about #9,524 on my list of lifestyle choices to minimize impact.
The power costs for bandwidth? Trivial. The environmental cost of a ten-gram chunk of plastic I'm going to use for 15 years? Insignificant.
Let's talk about the sustainability of my library, which has lots of cheaply-bound hardbacks that disintegrate after I read them four times, at which point they're a) unusable to me and b) don't recycle into anything I'm happy using again. (No, I won't use recycled toilet paper, and all the recycled typing paper products I've seen feel like newsprint, only thinner and crappier.)
Get me a lightweight, backlit, high-resolution ebook reader, without any stupid DRM reindeer games, and I'll gladly cut the spines off of all my books and scan them.
I'm serious. I want e-texts of everything.
I'd say downloading is the best way to go if you can't find it at a local rental place. Most of the stuff I get are documentaries anyway, a majority of which are not to be found in any rental place. I used to have a netflix account, but it just seems like it's too much trouble to get a few videos; we shouldn't have to spew CO2 into the atmosphere just to get 1-3 videos, ditto for any mail; yay for email. While at the same time, unless you are using green electricity, junk smoke is still spewing out into the atmosphere to keep the computers running.
I have used Netflix since Jan 2002, they're great. I also buy stuff used on ebay and half.com, and I sell on both too when I'm done with the book/cd/dvd. I really don't think "they" (the great computer gods in the sky I guess) have gotten downloading movies to be easy, fast, and successfull enough to make that worthwhile - YET. It will happen, just as it's getting much easier, smoother, with music.
The advantage of digital media is that local productions can reach world distribution immediately. A street performer in the local square can post digital images and sound to a website in real time with a wireless connection. What does that mean environmentally?
Downloading media may have greater ramifications for the environment in the battle over copyright and intellectual property rights than in the plastics and electricity used to produce the CDs, DVDs and whatever else is coming down the pike.
SUGGESTION: for future surveys, it's best not to up-to-date survey results as you ask the question. they have a tendency to skew all responses.
From a purely environmental perspective, downloading is probably better, but the DRM, RIAA, DMCA (or is it DCMA?), etc., gives me serious hesitation about investing solely in digital-only. (I also don't like the idea of having all my music _only_ on my hard drive. Too fallible.)
Check your local library!
My library has as many dvds as a blockbuster and a ton of music CDs as well. Oh yeah, books too. It's all free to check out! And you don't have to worry about the RIAA.
I too use libraries, but also NetFlix.
The two resources compliment one another nicely, if like me, you have the benefit of living in a large city that has a huge library collection multimedia.
Quality-wise, film and audio downloads can easily match (or excede in some areas) that of DVD. If you go the less-than-legal route, one can obtain the exact same data as on a DVD at the exact same quality via peer-to-peer (p2p) sharing ala Bittorrent (BT). One can also obtain High-Def TV broadcasts the same way, which are superior to DVD. Ditto for music and e-books, and any media that can be digitized. The limiting factor right now is not so much quality as it is bandwidth and infrastructure for *legal* media serving. the former just gets better and better, the latter is a big hassle that may not be figured out for a long while with regards to video.
cheers!
I use iTunes, though I think that one of the most sustainable ways of purchasing music/media is to buy from a local used music/media store. The idea behind this is that, in place of buying new over packaged products you are purchasing used (and most of the time) media that has little or no wasteful packaging. You are also supporting the local economy. In regards to the local economy, there has been comments made that in fact a larger percentage of each dollar is put back in to the local economy than if you where to buy from a national big box retailer.