Why We Love Downloads
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 08.21.07
25 years ago, on August 17th, 1982, the first Compact Disk (ABBA's the Visitors) came off the assembly line; 200 billion followed it. James Brentano writes in earth2tech that every month in the United States some 100,000 pounds of CDs become outdated, useless or unwanted. Every year, more than 5.5 million software packages go to landfills and incinerators. He notes studies that calculate that a kilogram of greenhouse gases are generated for each CD produced, packaged and delivered. About half of this comes from the production of the CD and half from transportation.
In the software biz, every $100,000 spent on commercial software reproduction creates the global warming potential of approximately 29 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents as well as 38 kilograms of toxic waste. We would add that most of
the software on CD's is obsolete and in need of updates as soon as it hits the shelves.
So happy birthday, compact disk; we hope you enjoy your retirement. ::Earth2Tech
I stopped buying media for the most part a couple of years ago. I rent DVD's from Netflix for the selection. Audio entertainment comes from XM radio. Audio/video Media has another problem, you have to store it. I have CD's, DVD's, VHS tapes, Cassettes, and LP records. All of it can be replaced with a few hard drives for storage. Death to media, long live the content!
Don't assume that just because there is no physical object there are no adverse environmental impacts from downloads. The data centers that support those downloads consume massive amounts of power and the servers that are used contain a broad array of toxics and embedded energy. I've not seen a life cycle assessment comparing the two, can anybody provide a comparison?
Someone with a kill-a-watt try this. Test how much power gets used by an hour spinning hard drives (normal work), and then burn a CD. I expect you will find that the burning the CD uses much more power than just running the HDD .
The problem with data centers isn't any one thing. Its more like the cumulative use by millions of little things, including this website. As far as toxic chemicals, you don't think CDs are harmless, do you? The manufacture also produces toxic waste, as well as what you receive.
And if your going to be a stickler for embedded energy, remember that there have to be machines that make the CDs too, and the odds are that companies were already creating digital records.
To equal the carbon cost of CDs, the data centers and downloads would have to use 2KwH per album downloaded if fueled by coal, much more if not.
Anonymous: Mass market CDs and DVDs aren't burned, they're pressed. So your comparison doesn't really work.
The cost of downloading is greater than the cost of a CD/DVD if you consider the infastructure of the Internet and datacenters required to host data, etc. AND you do not consider any other uses for the Datacenter. However, disks occupy landfills. Computers at Datacenters are recycled as much as possible! Also, consider that we use and reuse the Datacenter for thousands of other beneficial things. 700 MB of information is trivial to store in a Datacenter, but pressing CDs with the same 700 MB billions of times has a greater impact.