FM PRO TECH NEWS
Vinyl has spent the last decade being treated like music’s miracle comeback format. Now Warner Music Group is asking the less glamorous question: what happens when those records are scratched, unwanted, warped, or simply finished with?
The company has launched a US take-back pilot with independent record stores, turning participating shops into drop-off points for damaged or unwanted vinyl records. Fans can bring in records regardless of artist, label, or condition, with the collected material sent to Virterras Materials for recovery assessment.
It is not the sexiest part of the vinyl boom. That is exactly why it matters.
For years, the industry has celebrated vinyl’s growth while paying far less attention to the waste sitting behind it. Records are physical, collectible, emotional objects; but they are also made from PVC. Once they are no longer playable or wanted, the route forward has usually been vague at best.
Warner’s new pilot, running from late June through September, shifts the focus from cleaner production to vinyl’s end-of-life problem: can old records be collected, processed, and recovered at scale?
It follows Warner’s recent test with GZ Media and Abbey Road Studios, which recycled unsold stock and manufacturing waste into new commercial-grade vinyl. This one is harder. It deals with fans, shops, sorting, transport, cost, and damaged records that were never built to come back.
That is the real pressure point. Sustainability in music is easy to market when it starts at the factory. It gets harder when the system has to involve people.
Independent record stores are a smart place to start. They already sit at the centre of vinyl culture, not just as retail spaces but as community hubs. If fans are going to return old records anywhere, a trusted local shop makes more sense than a faceless corporate box-ticking exercise.
Virterras Materials will assess the collected records and explore how they can be moved into material recovery. The pilot is also supported by the Vinyl Institute’s VIABILITY program, which backs post-consumer PVC recycling projects.
The wider context is impossible to ignore. Vinyl is still growing. In the US, vinyl revenue rose 9.3% year-on-year to $1.04 billion in 2025, with unit sales up 7.9% to 46.8 million. That marked the format’s nineteenth straight year of US growth.
Great news for collectors, artists, labels, and stores. Less great if the industry keeps scaling the format without building a serious end-of-life system around it.
This pilot will not solve vinyl’s environmental problem overnight. Nobody should pretend it will. But it does test something useful: whether the music business can start treating physical formats as part of a circular system rather than a one-way product pipeline.
For Warner, the real question is not just whether old records can be recycled. It is whether fans, retailers, recovery partners, and labels can build a process that actually works at scale.
Because vinyl’s future cannot only be about better pressings, limited variants, and deluxe editions. At some point, the format also needs an exit plan.