Is vinyl bad for the environment? As Billie Eilish slams musicians over ... trends now

Billie Eilish hit the headlines this week after she critisized her music industry peers over their 'wasteful' practice of releasing numerous vinyl versions of albums to increase sales.

During an interview with Billboard, the 22-year-old Grammy winner said: 'I can't even express to you how wasteful it is.

'I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable.'

But is Billie right? 

MailOnline spoke to experts to understand the true impact of your favourite vinyl records on the environment. 

'We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging,' Billie said in the interview, adding that 'people' are 'just getting away with it.'

While the Oscar-winning musician later said she wasn't singling anyone out, many took this to be a dig at Taylor Swift.

Swift has established herself as the unrivalled queen of vinyl sales in recent years, selling 3.4 million records in the US in 2023, representing seven per cent of all sales.

For context, only 5.9 million records were sold in the whole of the UK that year, of which 85,000 were Swift's 1989 (Taylor's Version).

However, Swift also releases multiple variants of the same album, offering different colours or album art.

Although Eilish herself released eight versions of her album Happier Than Ever, she claims that such practices are 'really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable'.

Eilish is not alone in her concerns about the potential impact of vinyl records.

Records are made by pressing pellets of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) into grooved moulds under high heat pressure.