You are quite correct that plastic comes from fossil fuels, which are quite happily sequestered beneath the oceans. Extracting it and turning it into plastic is a good use for it (compared with the profligacy of burning it), but cannot count as useful carbon sequestration when viewing the balance of atmospheric carbon.

As for compression, this is not the right blog to have an audiophile debate. However, since I have a Masters in biomedical science, specialising in neurology, I feel I should point out that since you are a human being you are neurologically incapable of detecting the losses induced by good quality psychoacoustic coding. Regardless, even if you were downloading FLAC files and then re-coding them locally into mp3 (which some people I know do) it would still be vastly less carbon-intensive than a CD.

This fails to take into account the tactile satisfaction of owning a CD, its longer life span, it’s re-usability for playback in other devices, and the potential for lending to friends or even resale and subsequent re-use.

Also, you’ve failed to take into account the massive loss of audio quality in a typical downloaded. Whilst it’s true that lossless formats are commonly available, they aren’t supported by online retailers, they are generally incompatible with non-pc (or non-Mac) devices, and they always increase the file sizes substantially.

The only embedded carbon that we would really need to consider is the PC, and further one could subtract the embedded carbon in a CD player – I don’t have one anymore, for example (it broke and I did not need to replace it).

Thus, the real comparison is between the portion of time used by the PC (which has ~1,000 kWh embedded energy, say 1% of time/function is downloading, with a 4-year refresh cycle, is 2.5 kWh/year) and a CD player (guess ~200 kWh, 8-year refresh, 25 kWh/year).

Although your logic does not put the argument back in favor of CDs, it is a very good one and we should not forget embedded energy. Ultimately, all we really need though is a strong computer, a fast Internet link, and several audio-visual systems to do everything we need in a home – commonly called ‘device convergence’. Unfortunately, that is not in the interests of the consumer electronics manufacturers.

The unfortunate problem with technological solutions is that they all have a large up-front cost, whereas CD’s or indeed, individual downloads to a single computer have a minimal investment. Given how fast technology is changing / continues to change, it would be disengenuous to suggest that whatever today’s solution is will be the optimum one next week / next year.

Every time one invests in tech, one creates more potentially hazardous waste to be disposed of, and more stuff which will probably end up being disposed of before it has worn out, thus (as an old socialist at heart falling prey to consumerism as well as un-environmentally conscious fall out! Compare the cost of the purchase of all the new tech you need, in CO2 tonnage, versus purchasing the odd CD until your existing equipment wears out X years down the line.

Heh. And its expensive. I’m being naughty really in this mini-debate because I’m in the process of storing all my iTunes MP3′s on an external hard drive so that as my poor old G4 is biting the dust, my multiple tens of megs of music will not end up on the scrap heap. But I’m not going to attempt to string all my silo’d pieces together. Not yet.

@Cait Thanks. The problems of downloaded music management are easily solved with application of technology, and CDs are just as vulnerable (scratches, theft etc). Personally, however, I am moving away from downloading, even owning music; far easier to just stream what you want on-demand from the Cloud with last.fm / spotify etc.

I’m a bit of aln old-skooler whewn it comes to music, so I tend to prefer to buy CD’s. Hmmmm.

The only problem with the purchase of downloads is that one does tend to lose them (mostly because the systems you purchased from don’t maintain a record you can access of what you’ve bought, and can therefore recover), so if your laptop goes ‘blurt’, you have to purchase them again *or* dump them on to permanent storage ie: DVDs/CD’s!

My sample of ten CDs weigh 980g,
so, for 1000, with packing, we could say 100kg.

An appropriate carrier might be a Citroën Berlingo
which has a max. payload of 750-850kg.
Such a vehicle will vehicle pumps out ~150g/km CO₂,
as in http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/search/vehicleDetails.asp?id=22372
& http://www.citroen.fr/. This may be an optimistic figure.

Thus over 2@200 miles = ~640km
there is an emission of 640*150g = 96kg, or 96g CO₂,
coincidentally, very similar to the weight of the CD in its jewel case.

So, double your CO₂ or number of CDs in the load.