Exactly, how much does vinyl suck less than it did 30 years ago? This needs to be quantified.

[Robin L]

So your point is quit using anything made since the industrial age began?

The stream of the 2015 remaster of "Tusk" I'm listening to now initially involved a mountain of cocaine, which is pretty environmentally hazardous, I guess.

In any case, the streaming source I'm using eats energy, probably powered by coal-fired electrical generators.

Every time I fire up my computer, an angel dies.

 

[whereisbrian]

Since that can happen to any modern (yeah, I know, vinyl is not so modern) item being made (poisoning the environment with an accident), why don't you just revert to being a hermit & don't use anything made after 1800 or so? Jeez, what a DUMB point.
I'm just telling it like it REALLY is!

As is manufacturing most anything (if you are not careful). So your point is quit using anything made since the industrial age began?

My suggestion is to limit this kind of pollution as much as possible. But everyone is free to do as they please.

Buying vinyl records encourages a polluting industrial practice. This is inherent to all production: it depletes resources and produces waste that can be recycled to varying degrees.

We can always simply listen to music without thinking about it; it's just a matter of our level of awareness of our environment—me first, or all of us.

 

[EJ3]

I guess many of us have pet peeves.
Since I don't find vinyl records out in the woods when I am hunting, I don't particularly view them as polluting.
But I do run into a lot of other waste that shouldn't be in the forest, so I feel strongly about those issues.
As to vinyl chloride itself:
Vinyl chloride is used primarily (> 95%) in the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which comprises about 12% of the total use of plastic worldwide (WHO, 1999). The largest use of PVC is in the production of plastic piping. Other important uses are in floor coverings, consumer goods, electrical applications and in the transport sector. About 1% of PVC is used to produce vinyl chloride/vinyl acetate copolymer. Minor uses of vinyl chloride (monomer) include the manufacture of chlorinated solvents (primarily 10 000 tonnes per year of 1,1,1-trichloroethane) and the production of ethylene diamine for the manufacture of resins (WHO, 1999; European Commission, 2003).

Vinyl chloride has been used in the past as a refrigerant, as an extraction solvent for heat-sensitive materials, in the production of chloroacetaldehyde, as an aerosol propellant and in drugs and cosmetic products; these uses were banned in the United States of America (USA) by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1974 (IARC, 2008)

Apparently it's use as records is a pretty miniscule use, as it is not mentioned.
But it is mentioned here in off gassing, (something that happens in a short and limited time):

PVC products may contain VCM as a residue from production and release it in the air. In a German survey (1976–77), the following articles released VCM at levels > 0.05 ppm [0.13 mg/m3] by off-gassing in the air: bathroom tiles, piping, plastic bottles for table oil, and kitchen wrapping-film. The highest concentrations were observed to come from vinyl music records, with values of 20–50 ppm measured for nine of 14 records sampled, but even higher in some of the others. The VCM concentrations released by toys, kitchen utensils, food wrappings, wall-paper, and car interiors were < 0.05 ppm (German Environmental Office, 1978). The introduction of improved manufacturing practices has considerably reduced the residual content of VCM in PVC products (WHO, 1999).

I could not find any better information on this, unfortunately.
But it seems to me that there are many other things to do better that would have a much larger positive effect than doing something about vinyl records.

 

[Sal1950]

I only owned a few of MFs albums, but I was very crestfallen when my copy of Sergeant Pepper’s by The Beatles got a huge pop on one of the tracks after only a dozen playings. For me, that was the turning point where I decided that I would never buy vinyl again unless it was for a recording that was not available on CD.

Funny you should mention this, I've only heard it brought up a couple times before but I experienced the same with a couple MF titles ???
After is became a few years old, I'd pull it out of it's fancy rice or whatever sleeve and at some point I'd hear a really loud pop. A close visual inspection of the surface would reveal a divot somewhere along the grove that looked like someone had taken the point of a hot needle and pressed it into the groove? Don't know if it was the result of out-gassing of vinyl or some other material defect but it wasn't from anything I had done, I since the very early 1970s I used TOTL MM and MC needles and all the rest. Talk about being really pissed, after paying maybe twice or more for the disc than for one from a standard label. Grrrr.

Vinyl in audio was over & done, but, like Small Pox, it’s back… and for no good reason.

There was a "good reason", like the various forms of wire interconnects, power cords, and much more, the movers and shakers in the HIGH-END media found that the CD and other digital sources could be a financial dead-end. Just about any decent CD players sound quality couldn't be improved on no matter how much was spent. They tried most everything from putting tubes in the players circuit, to telling you the paint the edges of the CD with some lunny device but CD's could, for just a few dollars reproduce a bit-perfect copy of what the mic's heard in the studio. So what to do?, have the golden eared gurus tell the music lovers that digital was a bad turn, it sounded hard and edgy, if you spend a few thousand dollars or more on turntables, needles, preamps, tick and pop removers and all the rest, that a smashed hockey puck was the path to nirvana in sound. Pick up any issue of Stereophile or The Absolute Sound and you might almost think that digital didn't exist. 150 pages of lies in articles on VERY EXPENSIVE vinyl gear and it's ad's, together with almost as much BS on the High-Ends other Snake-Oil market like wire, grounding boxes, USB cleaners, SET tube amps, and so much other nearly useless crap.
It's all really just so sad, if just a small percentage of the time, money, and effort was put into investigating the things that really matter in recording and playback chains of SOTA music, we could have come far. Instead we fart around with dragging a rock thru a ditch trying to reproduce sound in the same manner as Edison invented almost 150 years ago.