A lot is said about the bad things that MP3s bring to the music industry, piracy, poor sound quality, the death of the album artwork to stare at and the long form listening habits. Something that I hadn't really considered was the environmental impact of purchasing CDs.

In early January, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had sold over 2,000,000,000 songs via the iTunes Store. That's about 166,000,000 CD's. Stacked one on top of each other, this pile of CD's (in their jewel cases) would reach almost 1050 miles high. If you tipped over this pile, it would extend more than 1/3rd of the way from New York to LA. If you laid the CD's down on the ground, they would cover 4.33 billion square inches which is about 640 acres of CD's. That's a lot of landfill...

link (via headrush.net)