I loathe jewel cases, the ubiquitous plastic cases that house most compact discs. They’re heavy, bulky, and fragile. My collection of CDs, while not huge, had totally outgrown whatever space I had to house it. Even after a rather draconian purge, there still wasn’t enough space for the discs I wanted to keep. The solution was to banish the hated jewel case from my home.

Jewel cases are bulky

I pulled my CDs, booklets, and j-cards out of their cases, and placed them in thin plastic envelopes specially made for CD storage. As the photo at right shows, I was able to place 100 CDs into a shoebox. The 500 jewel cases I purged were eating up nearly 17 feet of shelf space. Sans jewel cases, they fit into 5 shoeboxes easily.

Jewel cases are ugly

As someone who came of age in the LP era, I’ve always thought most CD packaging was crap. CD art on early discs was nothing more than a poorly reproduced image of the LP sleeve on a thin sheet of paper, with an astonishingly ugly j-card in the back. Die-cut LP jackets, embossed jackets, gatefold jackets, and other variations that made LP covers compelling, were all cheaply reproduced on flimsy paper and then jammed into a plastic case 10mm thick. The hideousness was compounded with an ugly black tray to hold the disc in place and tiny plastic hinges guaranteed to snap the first time they hit the ground.

Don’t think for a second that this lack of attention to packaging detail hasn’t contributed to the decline of CD sales in recent years. Record companies are in the business of selling shiny pieces of plastic. The value add is in the content embedded in the shiny plastic, as well as in the aesthetic value of the object itself. If the object isn’t compelling, it isn’t valued. If the difference between a download and a CD is a crappy slip of paper and a twenty-five cent plastic case, why on earth would anyone choose to pay fifteen dollars or more for a commercial CD?

Jewel cases are evil

Jewel cases are made of polystyrene (not the X-Ray Spex singer, rather the petroleum-derived polymer). Every jewel case manufactured helps to line the pockets of Dow Chemical, the hard rockin’ little company that brought you Agent Orange and Napalm Death (not the bands, the actual defoliant and incendiary liquigel). Despite the assurances of your pals at the Plastics Foodservice Packaging Group (PDF, opens in new window), polystyrene is not an environmentally sound solution to packaging needs. (It can, in theory, be recycled. If you don’t mind paying a bit for the service, you can recycle jewel cases through a company called GreenDisk.)

There are alternatives

Even bands and labels I admire seem to have accepted the default CD package without much of a fight. There are better options — LP-style mini sleeves (like we use on Tangleweed’s CDs, for example), which can be made of post-consumer recylced material. They’re cost competitive with jewel cases, thinner, way lighter, and less of an environmental disaster. For Tangleweed, it’s been cheaper to use these alternative packages, as our shipping costs, particularly when sending CDs overseas, are substantially reduced. Whatever additional costs we incur by not using jewel cases we recoup with lower costs down the road.

You don’t need them

Enough already.