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04/01/07 10:59 PM: Download music, help save the planet?

I was reading TIME Magazine’s special report on Global Warming, and it got me thinking. Currently I spent $3.00 per month to Cool Driver to offset the carbon emissions of my car. The Time article got me thinking about how much carbon is emitted in the production of a compact disc, and how much these emissions are reduced as a consequence of music downloading.

These are very rudimentary calculations, but I would imagine the general idea is fairly accurate.

The first figure I found for how much carbon is emitted from the production of a compact disc was via a blog, which cites its source as a Canadian firm called Offsetters. Their figure is .212 tonnes of CO2 per $1,000 of record sales. Figuring an industry typical $18 per CD (which is admittedly a bit high), that comes out to .0038 tonnes per album.

The music industry throws around large numbers for how much they have suffered, and one popular figure is $4.2 billion in lost revenue. This is attributed to multiple source of piracy, but we’ll work with the figure anyway.

Taking the .212 tonnes of CO2 per $1,000 figure, we come to an estimated carbon offset of 890,400 tonnes.

Sure, that figure may not be very accurate, as some of that may include “hard” copies made by pirates, which would have the same carbon emissions. So, say you go with a figure of 700,000.

That’s a fairly substantial figure. Add in legal downloading of music, with over 1 billion songs downloaded on the iTunes Music Store. Running that through my non-scientific calculations, that’s another 200,000 some tonnes of carbon. We’re now at around a million tonnes of carbon emissions reduced. Not too shabby.

Something to think about.

I’d be interested in more accurate calculations. If anyone has a source for CO2 emissions for the production of compact discs, let me know. Also, if we figure in full-length movie downloads… that would be interesting as well.