Kyle Devine | Longreads | July 14, 2026 | 2,384 words (9 minutes)
“Vinyl in the Veins” is an excerpt from Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change by Kyle Devine, published by Verso on July 14, 2026. This piece is adapted from chapters one and two of the book.
Vinyl record sales in the US have increased for 19 consecutive years, surpassing $1 billion in revenue in 2025. As vinyl’s popularity has surged, so has scrutiny of its environmental cost—and the music industry’s efforts to address it. In this excerpt from his new book Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change, Kyle Devine takes us inside the industry behind that boom, from a Hollywood conference room to a record-pressing plant near Vancouver. He introduces us to some of the companies working to green the industry, exploring a crucial question: What does the record of the future look like?
—Cheri Lucas Rowlands
“Slice my veins,” the CEO says, teasing the audience in front of her. “Little plastic pellets will probably come out instead of blood.”
Liz Dunster makes her living in plastic. Standing at the front of a conference room at the W Hollywood hotel, she is the founder and CEO of Erika Records, which has been pressing vinyl in factories near Los Angeles since 1981. Dunster was the first and, for a long time, the only woman to own such a plant. Erika makes all kinds of records, including many standard black LPs for big-name acts. But Erika is equally known for its small-run anomalies: custom shapes, picture discs, clear vinyl implanted with “love notes, yarn, peacock feathers—almost everything the FDA will allow.” One implant the Food and Drug Administration will not allow is maggots. The agency also ensures that, even though Dunster bleeds plastic figuratively, her records may not bleed blood literally.
Dunster is fond of the vinyl-in-the-veins imagery. She uses it often, including at Making Vinyl, an international business meetup, where in 2019 I joined her and three other panelists for a session called “Vinyl: More Sustainable Than You Think.” According to the event program, “today’s record industry is not like yesteryear’s from the perspective of raw materials.” These days, technical improvements have made things much greener. Our panel—consisting of Dunster, me, and representatives from a plastics supplier, a printing company, and a record label—was there to prove it.
For her part, Dunster talked about the possibility of pressing discs using recovered ocean plastics. She also emphasized that all her vinyl is made in the United States, relaying her experiences with suspect supplies from other countries. Dunster additionally noted that Erika had been making unleaded records since 2015, a move she puts down partly to being a parent and grandparent. “I’d hate to have a record that had lead,” she says, “and then a child starts gnawing on it.”
Next to Dunster, Ashby Baum of Westlake Chemical, a Houston-based Fortune 500 petro-polymer giant, also distanced his company from the poisonous heavy metal. Since LPs are made from a type of plastic that breaks down when it gets hot, as records do during the pressing process, they need a stabilizing additive. Lead—dense but yielding, silvery but ashen, handy but deadly—was long used for this purpose. Although some attendees were unsure what all the lead-free fuss was about, given that European suppliers had been using safer stabilizers since 1998, Baum reported the news as a minor triumph. Westlake was transitioning away from lead.
Baum also noted that his company used a significant amount of regrind. This is plastic that has undergone at least one round of processing, been rejected for some reason, then transformed back into raw material and reused. Record enthusiasts debate the role of regrind in the performance of their plastic. Some say it is beneficial. Others, detrimental. Westlake’s position is clear. Records sound best in the sweet spot where cost saving and planet saving coincide.
Record enthusiasts debate the role of regrind in the performance of their plastic. Some say it is beneficial. Others, detrimental.
Sam Gay of Stoughton Printing spoke next about the paper and packaging side of records. Stoughton has been making record labels, jackets, and inserts in the City of Industry, California, since 1964. Gay stressed that the company uses recycled paper and soy-based ink. He also noted that the factory had gone down to a four-day workweek, partly to eliminate commuter emissions.
Stoughton’s website, meanwhile, does more than advertise the company’s current greenness. It says Stoughton was operating an “environmentally responsible manufacturing facility” before it was “hip” to do so. As early as 1985, ahead of ever-tightening California controls on air and water pollution, the company transitioned to an aqueous printing process that is less toxic than solvent-based methods. And sometime before the Forest Stewardship Council started certifying responsible woodland harvesting in 1993, company founder Jack Stoughton apparently had the environmental foresight to source paper from mills that farmed their own trees.
Then there was Parks Vincent from Ninja Tune, an independent record label. The story of Ninja Tune’s sustainability, as Vincent told it, owes something to a musician on their roster: DJ and producer Jayda Guy—known as Jayda G in the music industry—who is also an environmental scientist. Around the time Jayda G released her 2019 album, and partly due to her insistence, Ninja Tune started offsetting their emissions by planting trees. They did away with single-use plastic packaging like shrink-wrap, and they were working to cut down on employee flights as well as product shipping. By 2021, among many other climate initiatives, they had cofounded Music Declares Emergency and the Association of Independent Music’s Climate Action Group. Ninja Tune was also a founding investor in a carbon calculator tailored to music’s independent industries, developed by the IMPALA Independent Music Companies Association and the nonprofit arts-and-environment organization Julie’s Bicycle. The label additionally announced plans to go carbon neutral by year’s end and carbon negative thereafter.
These were the types of organizations greening the music industry. But, for all their environmental initiatives, none of the industry representatives on the panel at Making Vinyl was asking what the LP looked like after oil. That elephant was in the room.
Billy Bones plays in a punk rock motorbike concept band called The Vicious Cycles. Their sixth release, Motorcycho, according to one reviewer, is such a compelling tribute to the two-wheeled life that “you’ll probably end up burning down your house and hitting the road forever.” Billy also runs Clampdown Record Pressing near Vancouver, which strives to be one of the greenest record pressing plants in the world. To understand the company, it helps to understand the band.
But first things first.
When I visit in early 2022, Clampdown is short on vinyl. Everybody is. Orders are backed up. Small bands can’t press small runs. Even some big bands can’t press big ones. Part of the problem is a mysterious worldwide shortage of raw materials—and not just in the plastics industry.
But Clampdown’s delay is not that kind of mystery. Billy knows exactly where his shipment is. It’s sitting across the border in the United States. He just doesn’t know why. Maybe there is a customs hiccup. Or perhaps it is reduced trucker capacity. Whatever the cause, everyone at Clampdown is eagerly awaiting the shipment. Each time the buzzer rings, all eyes lock on the overhead delivery door.
To keep things going in the meantime, Billy is reviving some dead stock. He has recently returned from a trip up British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast to collect a few boxes of unsold LPs from a local label. These can be reground and re-pressed into new records.
Regrinding has always been standard practice at Clampdown and throughout the industry—both upstream, at suppliers like Westlake Chemical, as well as downstream, at pressing plants themselves. But the practice takes on added significance in the face of climate crisis.
But, for all their environmental initiatives, none of the industry representatives on the panel at Making Vinyl was asking what the LP looked like after oil. That elephant was in the room.
Billy is keenly aware of the problems of plastic pollution, and he knows what it means to make records from petroleum products. “People talk about vinyl and wax, and it sounds cool,” he says, “but there is no getting around that vinyl records are PVC and every one that I make adds to the plastic in the world.” This is another reason Clampdown regrinds, over and above the shortage. Clampdown even has a program encouraging bands to bring in their unsold records so they can be turned into new ones. It is one of the ways the company strives to be environmentally responsible—along with ditching shrink-wrap packaging, adopting post-consumer paperboard for album jackets, and using hydroelectric presses, which don’t quite plug into a standard wall socket but do use less energy than the gas-powered boilers of traditional presses. In 2023 the company started planning to install a gas boiler, using biogas or renewable natural gas, as monthly bills for their electric water heaters were becoming unaffordable.
Regrinding is essentially recycling, and, like all recycling, it is a laborious, conflicted process. One of the main difficulties surrounds the paper labels at the center of records. New discs do not sound good with paper in them, and because these labels are pressed into records during manufacture, not stuck onto them after, they cannot simply be peeled off. You have to cut them out.
Billy shows me the setup. In the back corner of the plant there is an old drill press fitted with a hole saw. An employee sits low to the ground on an orange office chair, flinging plastic shrapnel everywhere as he bores out the centers, one by one, disc by disc. Billy demonstrates. The label-less rings are then fed into a shredder, which breaks them into little black nuggets that are ready to be reborn as records.
The process is not just time-consuming—it is also finicky. Because different batches of records use different plastic compounds, which means they have different melting properties, you can’t easily mix dead stock from various record labels, nor can you simply amass piles of used records from miscellaneous flea markets, estate sales, and so on. Regrinding and recycling multiple-sourced records in this way would introduce too many unknowns and inconsistencies into the pressing process. It would pose problems for quality control. What’s more, plenty of record lovers, including some Clampdown customers, believe the purest, freshest vinyl sounds best.
If the regrind process is time-consuming and finicky, that means it is also expensive. Regrinding shares in the conflicts and challenges that mark recycling more generally. Because recycling operates as an industry, its aims are forked. It is directed toward environmental protection as its underlying principle, but it is also directed toward economic profit as its overarching priority. Ideally, protection and profit would coincide, and ideologically they do. In these scenarios, whether real cases or rational distortions, everybody wins. In situations where principle and priority are at odds, though, the imperative of market competition wins and the environment loses. This hinders the recycling industry. It is the main reason the vinyl industry does not, as a general rule, regrind the billions of already existing records in order to prevent the production of new plastic.
This was the reality for many record-pressing companies in the early 2020s. Vinyl was hard to come by, factories were at capacity, and regrind was only a partial answer.
If ever there was a good time to make records out of something other than polyvinyl chloride, that time is now.
Clampdown’s founder has looked high and low for something other than PVC, or at least a better way of using it. I ask Billy if anything ever came of an idea he raised at Making Vinyl, where we’d first met, to make records out of recycled plastic window frames. Unfortunately not, he says, because windows start life as a different kind of plastic than records do. Window frames are made from unplasticized PVC, which lends them rigidity and durability, meaning they are long-lasting and low-maintenance from a construction standpoint. Unplasticized PVC is not suitable for records. Low maintenance in construction does not translate to high fidelity in music.
Billy was corresponding with a Canadian business that was making plastic products from reclaimed lumber. This seemed promising, though for unknown reasons the company stopped returning his calls. He wondered too about the potential of corn-based bioplastic, observing the prominence of cutlery made from compostable vegetal materials. Billy even has a caution-to-the-wind vision of ignoring the difficulties of mixed regrind—of doing a thrift store road trip, gathering old records, and re-pressing them anyway. Maybe the quality will be okay. Maybe the next Vicious Cycles record will be made in this way.
For now, though, Billy Bones is in a bind. He can’t get vinyl. But he can’t get away from it either.
If ever there was a good time to make records out of something other than polyvinyl chloride, that time is now.
Billy lives in another, related bind. He runs a company, sometimes around the clock. He has investors. He has employees. He is a businessman. Billy makes no bones about this. Still, he is not an enthusiastic capitalist. He is an anarchist with syndicalist sympathies and sometimes socialist leanings too. But the world is the world, he tells me, and he has people who depend on him. He has to keep the lights on. And, as he works to do that, Billy searches, as we all do, for meaning and purpose in an economic arrangement that accommodates—and, in a dark irony, both produces and profits from—these tensions between political ideals and practical realities.
After the factory tour, over cheeseburgers and soda, under a gray sky in a parking lot, we talk about what we’re listening to these days. I’m lost in Loretta Lynn and Roger Miller. Billy is also listening to ’60s stuff, like girl groups and reggae, and he says the most recent album by Personal and the Pizzas, another garage-ish concept band like The Vicious Cycles, is one of the best releases in the past 15 years. We talk too about how our worldviews were formed by the music we heard at impressionable ages. For both of us, this means punk.
Probably the most common observation about punk is that it embodies tensions and registers contradictions. Whether writing five decades ago or today, the genre’s most insightful commentators have always observed how punk fuses rebelliousness with commodification, capitalism with resistance. The Sex Pistols were dangerous; the Sex Pistols were a boy band. Arguments like this go back and forth and round and round, both sides—both truths—defining, aggravating, intensifying one another. But this cycle is not vicious. It is a tractive friction, the defining feature not just of punk but of most music and culture since industrialization.
The same basic friction defines technical responses to climate issues. Our burning desire to do whatever we can to help solve the crisis can be satisfyingly quenched within the confines of the economy that has itself begotten the crisis. For better and worse, this situation is the source of a beauty Clampdown embodies—the same beauty I find in music’s many responses to climate crisis more generally. It is also the source of what an early punk observer once called a strangely neglected topic of social inquiry. Fun.
Unable to resolve the dilemmas, with the politics of resistance and resignation spinning in my head, I retreated to my hotel and put on Motorcycho.
I wanna ride
I wanna ride
I wanna ride around
Let’s go get hotdogs in the city
Let’s go play pinball all night.
Copyright © 2026 by Kyle Devine. Published in 2026 by Verso. All rights reserved.
Kyle Devine is a professor in environmental studies and dean of graduate studies at the University of Winnipeg. His previous books include Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, an award-winning environmental history of the record industry.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
