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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.”

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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...