Last year, Taylor Swift was the biggest selling artist on vinyl in the US – quite the feat for someone born a year after CDs surpassed records in popularity. With sales of 3.484m albums, she accounted for one in 15 of all vinyl album sales in the country.

It is a testament to her phenomenal star power, but also the relentless marketing machine behind it. Her sales, observers say, have relied on the release of multiple versions of the same LP, exploiting her legions of devoted fans with a Pokémon-esque “gotta catch ‘em all” marketing strategy.

And some have raised concerns about the sustainability of provoking such excesses of mass consumption. More on Swift’s climate reputation, after this week’s most important reads.

Lost in the nostalgia of the so-called “vinyl revival”, of which Swift is leading the charge, is the fact that LPs, very much the music medium of the age of oil optimism, are themselves petroleum products – with a corresponding ecological footprint.

Vinyl LPs take their name from the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) that is their main constituent. Kyle Devine, associate professor in the department of musicology at the University of Oslo, is the author of Decomposed, a 2019 investigation into the “political ecology” of the music business.

The PVC in vinyl records is not only plastic, says Devine, but “one of the most toxic kinds of plastic”.

Chemical producers make PVC combining ethylene, obtained by the steam cracking of hydrocarbons (that is, the stuff that’s pumped out of the ground by oil and gas producers), with chlorine. The resulting vinyl chloride monomer is polymerised to form PVC resin, to which, in the case of vinyl record production, various stabilising additives – often including lead – are added.

When Devine investigated record production as the vinyl revival was just gathering steam, the industry’s main global source of PVC was Thai Plastic and Chemicals plc. “And they were well known for basically pouring toxic chemicals into the Chao Phraya – the main river flowing through Bangkok – as well as worker hazards,” says Devine.

While it’s hard to trace the provenance of PVC in any individual vinyl record, what is clearer is the environmental impact of producing any vinyl record. In a 2019 article for The Conversation, two academics from Keele University estimated the production of each disc leads to about 0.5kg CO2-equivalent emissions.

If that estimate is correct, a back-of-an-envelope calculation by the Guardian suggests the carbon impact of Swift’s vinyl album sales last year in the US alone amounts to an estimated 1,920 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions from their production alone.

But it would be wrong to lay the blame for all this at the feet of Swift the individual, or even Swift the artist, whose predilection for private jet travel and gargantuan-scale touring has already come under fire for its climate impact. (A spokesperson for Swift has said that her jet is “loaned out regularly to other individuals” and that she has bought sufficient carbon offsets to cancel out a proportion of the flight emissions produced by her Eras tour.) Really, Swift should be seen as a proxy for a capitalist system promoting expansion of mass consumption at an ever-accelerating pace.

“We’re talking about Taylor Swift like she’s a person, and of course she is a person, but she’s [also] a business, right?” says Devine. “This is a brand that we’re talking about. And this brand works by building certain kinds of fandom connections and certain kinds of fandom purchasing practices, and all of that. The point is [to] get people to buy more.”

So let’s all go back to streaming, ditch the vinyl LPs, and Swift, her fans and the planet can live happily ever after, right? Not so fast. All that data also has a cost.

In 2019, Devine and others estimated the carbon footprint of streaming, storing and transmitting music media, for the US market alone, at between 200,000 and 350,000 tonnes of CO2 – that higher estimate three times as much as the total carbon footprint of vinyl production during the medium’s heyday in 1977.

“From a carbon emissions perspective … the transition towards streaming recorded music from internet-connected devices has resulted in significantly higher carbon emissions than at any previous point in the history of music,” Devine said at the time.

All this must be placed in perspective. As big as these numbers seem, music’s environmental cost remains small beer compared to the real drivers of ecological destruction on our planet, Devine says. And he cautions, too, against joyless degrowth narratives that insist we must consume less.

“[That] makes sense for people who already have enough,” says Devine. “But most people in most places need more.”

The answer, he says, may lie with the fans themselves, and their capacity for self-organisation beyond the direction of the Swift record-selling machine.

“It’s not even about Taylor Swift fans should get together and save the lions or something like that,” says Devine. “No – they should join with other socially progressive movements that are gathering themselves together to take a stand against the biggest thing that Taylor Swift is a part of. That bigger thing basically being that she is a commodity product of the capitalist system, effectively.”

This piece was first published in Swift Notes, the Guardian’s new weekly newsletter about all things Taylor Swift. Sign up here for more

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