Executive Summary
The Music Climate Pact and the Vinyl Alliance share a long-term ambition to support more sustainable record manufacturing practices. To enable decisions to be informed by the best available data both organisations launched a sustainable supplier data programme in 2025. The organisations engaged Climate Partner to deliver this work against the following objectives:
- To align methodologies used to quantify product-level carbon emissions.
- To improve the specificity and accuracy of the carbon emission factors used by Music Climate Pact signatories to report their scope 3 organisational carbon emissions associated with record manufacture.
- To support the transition to more sustainable methods of record manufacturing.
The first phase of this programme used a Life Cycle Accounting approach to measure the product level carbon emissions for the range of different record manufacturing options in the marketplace today. This report is based upon data that was calculated for 13 Product Carbon Footprints (PCF) that were calculated and validated from nine different suppliers representing a substantial share of the global manufacturing supply chain.
A number of key findings and indicative recommendations were identified from the hotspot analysis of the PCFs including transitioning away from fossil fuels in the manufacturing process, in particular natural gas for traditionally pressed products, switching to 100% renewable electricity, using bio-attributed materials and increasing recycled content. These findings indicate the potential for approximately 40-60% carbon savings at the product level, depending on manufacturing context and implementation pathways.
The priority actions outlined in the report vary depending on manufacturing techniques. However, a number of common opportunities are identified across both traditionally pressed record manufacturers and injection moulding record manufacturers, including implementation of renewable electricity, the use of recycled raw materials and the sourcing of supplier-specific data to enable evidenced improvements. These should be understood as directional insights rather than prescriptive requirements.
Many of the improvement opportunities identified involve additional costs and investment, and it should not be assumed that record manufacturing facilities will absorb these costs alone; meaningful progress will require coordinated commitment and shared responsibility across the value chain.
This study provides a baseline to support measurable improvement actions; however, this is only the start of the process of enabling truly sustainable value chains.
Building upon the data gathered in this exercise, promoting lifecycle thinking in supplier and label discussions is an important priority. Immediate next steps include convening a series of focused technical workshops with suppliers and labels to inform guidance on sustainable record manufacturing practices.
Aligning approaches to quantifying cradle-to-gate carbon emissions is an important first step. Value chain partners are encouraged to build upon this data to understand the wider environmental impacts that exist beyond carbon emissions within the full lifecycle to enable action to be taken to address these.
Participation in this programme is voluntary and non-binding, and the work is limited to technical methodologies and sustainability measurement. It does not address pricing, output, supplier selection, procurement terms, or any other competitively sensitive commercial matters.