What is the green way to enjoy music? iPod vs. Walkman

Today we want to travel into the past for a bit and recall the stages that music has passed through.

Remember back in the 70s when you were cool if you had a boombox hung on your shoulder and you were to Run-DMC or James Brown? I always wondered if the guy that carried that huge thing was deaf. He must have been! And in the 80s and 90s along came the Walkman that allowed you to listen to music as loud as you wanted, without disturbing anyone else on the street. The headphones were a bliss for every single human being that wanted to hear his own thoughts around a kid that loved rock music.

Around the time the millennium changed, things in the music sector changed as well and people wanted to be as stylish as possible when listening to their favorite band, regardless they were in public places or in the comfort of their own private room – the iPod came along. And it has stayed pretty much until now.

But enough with remembering things that are passed and forgotten, lets fast forward to our subject on today’s list: What is the green way to enjoy music? iPod vs. Walkman.

In order to calculate the carbon footprint of these devices, we must first see what exactly is there to calculate. We are leaving from the premises that we do have both gadgets in our hands, so let’s see which way to listen is greener.

If we take the walkman into verification, it is easy to see that to make it work you must feed it cassettes as well as batteries. Taking a simple, common cassette, we have found out that to make such a cassette around 55-70 grams of polyester material are needed, in addition to the magnetic band that stores the songs. This means that one simple cassette that holds an average of 12 songs on it has an emission of 220 – 280 grams of CO2 (1 kg of polyester emits apx. 4 kg of CO2). But what happens if you are on a long trip to somewhere and you are bored to death and you want to listen to music for a longer time?

Since we want to make things interesting every time, we put up an average line for everyone to follow. Let’s say that you listen to 100 songs before you throw the thing away; with an average of 4 minutes per song and 60 minutes as the duration of the entire tape that would translate into 6.66 cassettes, approximately 7 cassettes for 100 songs. That is one long trip to make!

Alright, all this being said, we return to our walkman’s consumption. We have decided that if we want to listen for 6 hours and 45 minutes to a walkman, we need to bring with us 7 cassettes, which sums up to 1540 – 1960 grams of CO2 only for the tapes. But to actually listen to the thing, we need batteries. We all know that the medium life duration of a zinc battery is around 20 h and for an alkaline one is 30 hours. But when running constantly they wear up much faster than that.

For example, a popular model from Sony, the Walkman Professional WM-D6C is powered by 4 standard AA batteries (apx. 4 hours of play time). This gets us to the following calculation: to listen to music continuously for 7 hours we need around 7 AA – batteries (or 3-4 batteries for a 2 batteries Walkman model). Rawmaterials.com states that even though household batteries make up just 1% of the waste on a landfill site, they are responsible for an incredible 50% to 70% of all heavy metals found in the landfill. The solution to this problem could be the use of rechargeable batteries, but they need a separate recharging device and their performance tends to disappoint. Moreover, the average rechargeable battery is only actually charged 8 times before it is lost, accidentally thrown away or the recharger is broken, states Carboncommentary.com.

Of course, modern Walkmans are very different from their ancestors and are in fact much closer to the iPods series from Apple. Jumping over to the competition and new trends, it’s the iPod’s turn to be under the green microscope. In order to make the right comparison, we will keep the same average line like in the walkman’s case.

In order to listen to music continuously for 7 hours an iPod must download the same number of songs – 100. With the average size of 3 MB, this means that you have to download 300 MB. At an average speed of 1 Mb/s, it will take you around 40 min to download all the files, all that having an emission of apx. 480 grams of CO2. As it does not function on batteries, we skip this step, but we bump into charging the devices. According to its technical specifications, an iPod runs without having to recharge it for 14 hours. An MP3.com report stated that this was virtually unachievable under real-life usage conditions, with a writer for MP3.com getting on average less than 8 hours from an iPod (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Battery_problems). This should be enough to listen to our 100 songs, but we have to consider the recharging process which takes around 160 min (http://eec1.ucdavis.edu/epyc/BryanPon-USB-Charging.pdf). If we use a wall charger, the energy consumed would be 4.8 Wh, apx. 2.16 g of CO2. Therefore, in the case of the iPod, it all piles up together, to apx. 482.16 g of CO2.

By comparison, the Sony Walkman W series is a wireless MP3 player built into a set of water-resistant headphones with 2 GB of internal memory. It needs apx. 90 min to fully recharge and can play 11 hours of music, making it more then enough to cover our 100 songs and 7 hours of listening.

This week we want to change the conclusion pattern of all our posts. Instead we want to tell you some true facts about the technology evolution. Last year, a 13 year-old kid was asked to use a walkman for one week, instead of his iPod. In his review he stated: “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape”, “I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer” and “I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured”.

All in all, evolution is the best!