Downloaded Music Radically Greener Than CDs

Music fans looking for the greenest way to get their tunes now have an answer. The New York Times’ Green Inc. recently ran a piece focusing on the results of a study aimed at calculating the emissions impact of buying music in digital form, instead of CDs.

It should come as no surprise that CDs, with the manufacturing and transportation needed to get them to your house, end up with a much larger carbon footprint than purely digital music. In fact, when someone downloads an album instead of going to a store and buying the CD, they can cut carbon emissions related to acquiring that album by about 80 percent.

Thanks to this study, we now know for sure that downloading an album is a much more environmentally-friendly way of getting music than old-school CDs. But, what I really want to know is which is greener: an iPod or a CD player?