Crisp response: these CDs are sold in an ex Walkers foil wrapper.
It feels like five minutes ago that musicians were among the most profligate wasters of resources. Private jets on standby, fleets of limos sitting with engines idling, destruction of hotel furnishings if they were feeling merry - those were the days.
There are some who still large it, like the jerk from this week's number-one band, the View, who recently put a duvet into a hotel bath, turned on the tap and let the water run until it flooded the room downstairs. How much more raaaack can a boy get than to pointlessly waste water in a Travelodge, eh? Maybe he was celebrating the lifting of the hosepipe ban in southern England.
Anyway, View aside, rock stars tend to be eco-conscious now. If they don't go to the lengths of Thom Yorke, who has proposed that Radiohead cut back on flying by no longer playing distant parts of the world (a gift not just to the environment but to the people who will be spared their presence), at least most of them aren't throwing televisions out of windows any more.
A London band called ReCoup is going one better, by refusing to package their CDs in plastic jewel cases. Instead, they've distributed all 3,000 copies of their first single, Remind You, in crisp packets - an ingenious use of an otherwise unrecyclable item. Their MySpace site gives a step-by-step guide to the rather laborious process, which involves soaking and polishing the crisp packets, but the result is some rather handsome wrappers. The labels used to seal them are made of recycled paper, naturally.
So ReCoup are due lots of brownie points (built from recycled brownies, obviously), and are clearly admirable people. But - oh, let's be honest - the thought of these crisp wrappers makes me weary. In the same way that I cannot get excited about the "ecofriendly" clothes and makeup brands that have been introduced in the past year or two, I wouldn't be able to derive much pleasure from a CD that was packaged in a Walkers bag. The smugness I'd feel at doing something virtuous would be negated by the lack of luxury - because, for me, CDs are one of life's small luxuries, and I want to be able to admire them in their rigid plastic cases, rather than make do and mend.
How often do you throw out a CD case, anyway? It's not as if there's a mountain of them, discarded by capricious consumers who get bored with the music. Those who've converted their collection into MP3s don't chuck out their redundant CDs - they store them in the loft, ready for the day the iPod expires and they need to do it all again. And speaking of which, why don't ReCoup do the really green thing and not press physical CDs at all? Just wondering.
