I remember, way back in the early-90s, that a group of Nashville musician types like Roseanne Cash and Rodney Crowell got together and formed an organization to try and take the recording industry in a more “green” direction. Writing about their efforts, I agreed wholeheartedly with their goals, but I thought that the overall approach was doomed to fail. Although Cash, Crowell and their friends were young, smart, hip, free-thinking kind of folks, the people that they were appealing to were older, wealthier, greedier and firmly entrenched in the halls of power on Nashville’s “Music Row.”

Just now, a decade-and-a-half later, is significant change coming to the way that record labels package and promote their music. From the “long box” to the plastic jewel case, critics have long lamented the state of compact disc packaging. With vinyl, you had cardboard covers and paper sleeves that could have been made from recycled materials, even if they often weren’t; vinyl itself may have been environmentally unfriendly, but at least RCA Records attempted to cut back on the amount of plastic they used with their flimsy Frisbee recordings.

Compact discs – an amalgam of thin metal, plastic and laminate – are an imperfect medium, to be sure, but the plastic jewel case is a monstrosity cooked up in another era. The swing-out front of the jewel case regularly breaks at the hinges, and the center tray with the hub often loses teeth and refuses to hold the disc. Environmentally-conscious artists have long experimented with better ways to package their music, from recycled cardboard sleeves and digipaks to using soy ink to print with. Often times, however, that damn plastic tray with its unreliable hub remained and, sadly, if it broke there was no larger case to keep the disc from flying every which way.

These days, however, an innovative company by the name of Shorewood Packaging has developed the most eco-friendly way to package a compact disc (or DVD) that I’ve seen since the invention of the medium by Phillips. Yeah, Shorewood is a division of International Paper, who has not exactly had a stellar reputation as a defender of the great outdoors. Nevertheless, Shorewood has supplied the largest percentage of the recording industry’s packaging needs for decades, so why not make that packaging better for the environment?

Shorewood’s revolutionary greenchoice™ initiative takes a number of disparate eco-elements and puts them together to create a better package to wrap around our CDs. The company uses a mix of virgin and recycled materials in its paper and paperboard, vegetable-based inks to print with and, probably its most innovative measure, its PaperFoam® CD/DVD tray made of natural materials that completely eliminates plastic altogether. Universal Music has gone with Shorewood’s Ecopak™ design for the label’s low-cost “Millennium Collection” series and recently released its Eureka Season One DVD box set in a package consisting of greenchoice™ materials.

Now before some of you get your hackles raised, the Reverend has not been paid a single penny to shill for Shorewood or Universal or anybody else. I have long felt that CD packaging was a crime against nature and I’m glad that somebody is doing something about it…I just hope that we don’t find out that Shorewood clubs baby seals and uses their whiskers to make its PaperFoam® trays. I have received a number of Universal CDs with this packaging and, after seeing a recent ad for Shorewood’s greenchoice™ in a trade magazine, put the pieces together myself for this posting. Outside of bypassing packaging in its entirety and taking your music directly to the digital realm as bands like The Floating Men have, the Ecopak™ is the best bet for those of us who want both our music and our environment, too....