helping

Sorry to rain on your all-analog parade.

It’s no secret that vinyl records’ resurgence has hit a new plateau, outselling CDs for the first time since 1987 as of 2022, according to a report from the Recording Industry Assn. of America. Three years later, its year-end report flaunts another statistic: Vinyl record sales surpassed $1 billion in 2025 — the first time since 1983.

But there’s an inevitable downside to anything that’s partially made of liquid dinosaur bones. Modern vinyl records are crafted with PVC resin, which makes up more than 75% of an average disk The synthetic polymer itself is made of chlorine and fossil fuel-derived feed stock.

To put its harm in perspective, a first-of-its-kind report from Vinyl Alliance, published in June 2024, found that 50% of a record’s carbon emissions come from this resin. The carbon footprint of a single LP was estimated to be roughly equal to the pollution a gas-powered vehicle emits over a three-mile trip. It adds up quick, considering that 46.8 million new records were sold last year.

Thankfully, it’s not all grim.

Organizations like Music Declares Emergency and the Music Climate Pact initiative are coming together to address the issue. A campaign by the groups — in collaboration with record labels and distribution teams at Secretly Group, Exceleration Music, Warp Records, Ninja Tune and Beggars Group — features titles pressed on 100% reclaimed material.

The release, set in tandem with World Environment Day on Friday, boasts marquee titles such as Elliott Smith’s “Roman Candle,” Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” and Dinosaur Jr.’s “You’re Living All Over Me.”

“What we found talking to a lot of our artists and to customers is that … they are concerned about the environment, and they want to find ways to reduce their footprint,” says Ben Swanson, co-founder of both Secretly Group and the Independent Record Pressing plant in Bordentown, N.J., where the LPs are made. “It’s about 16% less footprint than the traditional piece of vinyl.”

Soren Smith working at Independent Record Pressing in Bordentown, N.J., on May 26, 2026.

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

Largely, it’s been people like Swanson who have fully committed to the cause. He says that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in an “activist moment,” several labels signed onto the Music Climate Pact, declaring their intention to reduce their emissions and be better stewards of Earth.

“It had almost no teeth to it,” Swanson explains. “A lot of people signed it, posted something on Instagram, and it sat there for a few years. For us, it was pretty frustrating … it felt very perfunctory.”

His work continued, along with a few others, thanks to support from Murmur, an organization designed to support labels and industry names, effectuating the commitments made when the Music Climate Pact was signed.

“We’re more doers than sayers,” Swanson says. “We’ve really been experimenting with what we’re calling ‘Revinyl’ — post-industrial, pre-consumer, recycled vinyl as a means to reduce our footprint at IRP.”

This is what some of Friday’s release is made of — all the trimmings, tidbits and overstock that would otherwise end up in landfills or on the factory floor. For the time being, it certainly won’t solve the climate cost of vinyl records, but it helps to mitigate it.

Between 2024 and 2025, total units produced at Independent Record Pressing increased by 41% while emissions — which also benefited from lower-carbon transportation — decreased by 34%.

“The idea is, if you can make those records 16% more efficient and also show fans of those records … that it is viable, maybe it makes it a little bit easier next year when we go out to ask other artists to jump on board,” Swanson explains. “We’re not making records that are just going to go sit on the shelf — these are records we’re continually repressing all the time anyway.”

Similarly, Ian Stanton, head of sustainability at Beggars Group, was among the first to sign the pact in 2021. His role was created five years ago to give indie labels a voice in light of minimal resources and capabilities. Though these roles do exist at larger labels, he says they have “slightly different drivers.”

When it comes to records, the pure plastic pollution that comes from them is also a concern. When old records make it to a landfill, they’re not only likely to outlive the site, but can also leach plasticizers, a Keele University report found.

“Vinyl is not like a single-use plastic; we don’t throw it away after one listen. We treasure it, we pass it on through generations, and people have a real connection with it,” he says. “But like any other product, there are ways of making it more sustainable.”

He refers to certain plastics, such as shrink wrap, as the most “visible” aspect of vinyl record pollution to consumers. From a collector’s point of view, shrink wrap can actually increase the value of a record. Though there has been discourse over the years around whether this can actually damage the sleeve, many sellers champion an “in the shrink” label as they mark up prices.

Splatter-patterned records arrive at the trim station at Independent Record Pressing in Bordentown, N.J., on May 26, 2026.

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

Other visible aspects, such as the paper sleeves in which the records are housed, are also harmful. However, Swanson says that swapping those for recycled materials outputs a relatively negligible difference in emissions impact, largely due to the process behind producing them.

For the time being, vinyl records made from reclaimed materials are the best that companies like Swanson’s can do, though they’re are always on the lookout for other, viable options for improving their footprint. As an example, they’re actively experimenting with how existing record material can help them.

What can the beat-up, worn-out records at your local thrift store do to dodge a landfill and keep the Earth spinning? As it stands, not much.

Stanton lists an array of challenges, including outdated materials, modern production regulations and contaminants.

“I suppose what we need with PVC for records is a really high-quality, contamination-free material to get that sound reproduction,” he explains. “When you bring in stuff from that post-consumer environment, you’ve got to make sure there’s no contamination in there, because you’re going to end up with sound quality issues.

“It’s all in process,” he adds.

For now, they look to fix the most immediate problems first, such as freight emissions, where Beggars Group has converted the vast majority of its shipping operations to sea freight, a far less harmful alternative compared with air freight.

“We want to look at the full life cycle … not only thinking from the cradle to the grave, but from the point where the raw materials are extracted at the beginning,” Stanton says. “This life cycle analysis now looks at all different environmental indicators on this — the chemical usage, the water usage, and the end-of-life impacts on that side of things.”

WASHINGTON — Alabama on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to use a congressional map favoring Republicans in this year’s elections, despite a lower court’s ruling that the redistricting plan intentionally discriminates against Black people.

The state’s Republican leadership filed an emergency appeal with the justices a day after a three-judge court refused to let the state use a map it adopted three years ago that has a majority Black population in just one of its seven congressional districts.

The judges instead required Alabama to continue using a court-ordered map that was put in place for the 2024 elections that includes two districts where Black residents comprise a majority or close to it.

Atty. Gen. Steve Marshall told the court that the state did not intentionally discriminate against Black residents and should be allowed to hold elections this year under a map chosen by lawmakers, not judges.

The appeal is the latest development in the fallout from last month’s Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Black-majority district in Louisiana and weakened the federal Voting Rights Act. That ruling has led Republicans in several Southern states, including Alabama, to take steps to reshape voting districts with large minority populations that have elected Democrats.

The redistricting frenzy is part of a broader push by President Trump to try to hold on to Republicans’ slim House majority in the November elections.

The Alabama cases stretches back several years. The three-judge panel in 2023 ruled that a map drawn by Republican state lawmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of Black citizens. The court said the state, which is about 27% Black, should have two districts where Black voters are the majority or close to it. The court-selected map was used in 2024.

After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Louisiana case, Alabama officials moved to implement the 2023 state-drawn map. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreed to lift the injunction that had blocked the map’s use and sent the case back to the three-judge panel for reconsideration in light of the Louisiana ruling.

In the meantime, voters cast ballots in Alabama’s May 19 primaries, and Republican Gov. Kay Ivey set new special primaries for Aug. 11 in four congressional districts affected by the map switch.

Upon further review, the judicial panel said it was standing behind its initial finding that there was “undisputed evidence” of intentional racial discrimination, a holding that was independent of and unaffected by the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

It said the special congressional primaries should instead proceed under the previous court-approved districts.

The use of the court-ordered map led to the 2024 election of U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat. State Republicans are seeking to use a map that would give the GOP an opportunity to reclaim the south Alabama seat.

The state is asking for Supreme Court action by Monday as it makes preparations for the special vote in August.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

Baseball players like to feel comfortable wearing their hats but also look good when taking them off. That’s where sophomore JV baseball player Noah Nolasco from Birmingham High comes into play.

He’s been cutting hair for players in the East Valley, from Birmingham to Poly to Sylmar to Bishop Alemany. He’s been busy because the playoffs are taking place, and players are apparently following the philosophy “look good, feel good, play good.”

One of his customers is Birmingham sophomore pitcher Carlos Acuna, who’s 11-0 and plays in Saturday’s City Section Open Division championship game against El Camino Real at Dodger Stadium.

Nolasco said a taper is the favorite haircut these days and there’s also players bleaching their hair blond for the playoffs. He normally charges $25.

Here’s his instagram page.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

Smart, cynical about politicians but not apathetic. That’s how MTV political reporter Tabitha Soren describes her audience . It’s also a good description of Soren herself.

A former reporter and anchor covering state politics for an ABC – TV station in Burlington , Vt . , the 25-year-old Soren has won praise from TV critics for her informed questioning of the presidential candidates about young people’s issues on MTV’ s “Choose or Lose” coverage of the 1992 campaign.

MTV’s coverage has been aimed at getting the MTV generation registered to vote and motivated to go to the polls. In the last presidential election, less than 34% of eligible 18-to-24-year-olds turned out to cast ballots.

Soren, who is under contract to MTV through November, 1993, traveled the country covering the campaigns and in the process became something of a celebrity. Last weekend she interviewed President Bush aboard his campaign train .

Question: Why do you think that President Bush decided to talk to you?

Answer: One reason may be that, independent of MTV, a young voter in Florida recently asked him, “Why won’t you go on MTV?” His answer was that he was not a “mod MTV kind of guy”–which is the last thing young people want to hear. Using a ‘60s word like mod –that’s sort of saying he’s out of touch with young people. Young people have voted Republican in the last three elections. They grew up during a Republican dynasty, and that is how they formed their values. With the presidential race getting so close and seeing the numbers of young people getting registered, maybe (Bush’s strategists) thought this could be an easy constituency to win over.

Q: Do you think President Bush is out of touch with young people?

A: He hasn’t talked about young people’s issues enough for young people to even be able to tell. His big things are the line-item veto, capital-gains taxes, public- or private-school vouchers–all of these are things within issues that young people care about, like the economy and education. But there aren’t a lot of 20-year-olds that have capital gains.

Q: What are the issues that your audience is interested in?

A: They’re interested in the economy, the economy and the economy. When I go to colleges to talk, to encourage them to register to vote and to vote, students will ask their “I’ll ask this in front of an audience” serious, political questions. Then, afterward, they all come up to me and want to know how I got my job. They’re getting ready to graduate, and they don’t have job prospects. It makes me feel a little guilty about having a job.

The economy is No. 1 on their minds. But they’re also concerned about the environment. They want the homeless problem solved, they want to find a cure for AIDS, they want the deficit eliminated. Young people are the ones who are going to be stuck with that deficit. . . . Ross Perot wants to eliminate the deficit, and he says he is running on behalf of young people. Before he withdrew from the race in July, it was hard to find young people who weren’t for him.

Q: How were you regarded when you first started out in the New Hampshire primary?

A: Nobody had ever heard of MTV News; they didn’t know we had a news department. We’d walk up to the candidates, camera rolling, and say, ‘We’re trying to get more young people to vote.’ When you say that, most candidates–hopefully, even without a camera rolling but certainly with one rolling–would look pretty bad if they didn’t talk to you. I think they found it novel.

Each one of the Democratic candidates had their little thing they did to make them look hip for MTV. Jerry Brown had on a suit when we asked to talk to him, but he changed into a turtleneck and flannel shirt for the interview. Gov. Bob Kerry walked up to me and said, ‘I want my MTV.’ ” And Pat Buchanan said, ‘I hope you aren’t going to ask me about any of that hard-rock music because I can tell you right now I don’t like it.’ Buchanan seemed surprised when I kept asking him questions about his ‘America First’ agenda–questions about music were not on my mind.

Q: Why do you think you and MTV News have received so much attention from other news organizations during the election?

A: I think we’ve energized a lot of young people with our coverage, and perhaps we’re forcing the politicians to talk about young issues in ways they weren’t before. Our coverage is fair and unbiased. But the whole point behind ‘Choose or Lose’ is advocacy journalism–getting young people to vote, regardless of which candidate they vote for. There are a lot of voter-registration groups–Rock the Vote, Project Vote and others–that are using celebrities and others to make voting trendy, make it cool. As silly as those words sound, getting young people excited about voting–something so basic to this country–is very important. If we don’t vote, how do we expect politicians to listen to our concerns?

Q: If young voters don’t turn out to vote in greater numbers, will you consider that a referendum on your coverage?

A: I don’t think it will be a referendum on our coverage, but I will be very disappointed. This is what my life has been consumed with for the past 10 months.

Q: How has it been for you to become a celebrity yourself, being interviewed by other TV reporters at the Democratic convention, appearing on “The Tonight Show’ and being parodied on “The Ben Stiller Show”?

A: We were helped a lot in gaining credibility because other news organizations did stories on us early on. But being interviewed at the Democratic convention–I took that as a sign of slow news at the convention! Being on “The Tonight Show”–that made me petrified. I was already sick with the flu and a 102-degree temperature, and I was so nervous before the show I got sick to my stomach. It’s not something you say, “Oh, no big deal.” But I’m not going to get used to it–because after the election, it’s going to be over.

As far as being parodied, I don’t mind that because the people doing it don’t seem to have seen our coverage, so how can I be offended?

Q: Why do you think alternative media–from MTV News to Larry King–have gained prominence during this campaign?

A: I think what we do is supplemental. I tell people all the time to read books and newspapers because you just can’t get all the information you need from television. But I do think that political information has expanded. Movies like “JFK” are forcing the government to reopen files on the Kennedy assassination; rap groups like Public Enemy are addressing the issue of race much more directly than the evening news.

Q: Are young voters today cynical?

A: They’re cynical, but they’re not apathetic. That’s the difference. They haven’t voted, perhaps, because they grew up in an era first of government deregulation and, later, an era when many people feel alienated from Washington. But college freshmen today demonstrate and protest at the grass-roots level about issues like civil rights and abortion. They’re worried about jobs, but they’re also the ones who want to cure homelessness and feed the people in Somalia. They just want to know that someone in Washington is listening to their concerns.

When Joe Biden launched his campaign for the presidency in 2019, his economic proposals were relatively modest updates of the middle-class-oriented agenda he championed as vice president under Barack Obama. “It doesn’t require some fundamental shift,” he said, pushing against the sweeping proposals of rivals like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Then came the pandemic.

Today, Biden’s economic message, retooled to address current needs, has real urgency.

“We can’t wait,” he said last week. “There’s a lot of people who are in real, real trouble — a lot of people going to bed at night, staring at the ceiling wondering … if they’re going to be evicted.”

And Americans seem ready to spend to make things better. The huge $1.9-trillion pandemic relief bill Biden has proposed is wildly popular. A CBS News poll last week found that 79% of Americans want Congress to pass a bill as big as the one Biden proposed, including 61% of Republicans.

Biden isn’t stopping at pandemic relief. He’s also using the emergency to build support for the far broader program of economic reform he adopted midway through his campaign last year, including massive investments in manufacturing, technology, education and child care.

“We’re in a position to think big and move big,” he said.

He’s following the advice that Rahm Emanuel, then a member of Congress, offered during the financial crash of 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

For Biden, that begins with the pandemic relief plan, a package that includes a $1,400 check for most adults, increased unemployment insurance, a child tax credit of up to $3,600 a year, $440 billion for state and local governments and $130 billion to help reopen schools.

And once that proposal is enacted, White House officials say, the president will turn to the broader, long-term economic proposals of his campaign, including a $400-billion “Buy American” plan to support manufacturing, $300 billion for research and development, more spending on clean energy and — if it doesn’t pass as part of the pandemic package — a $15 minimum wage.

It’s an ambitious agenda: a dramatic expansion of federal government spending to create jobs, especially in manufacturing and strategic technologies.

Biden’s economic populism is aimed, in part, at the same voters Donald Trump appealed to when he called for revitalizing American manufacturing and bringing jobs back home — but only in the sense that Biden, too, has promised to repair some of the damage wrought by the long decline in manufacturing jobs.

“A lot of white working-class voters thought we forgot them,” he said last year during a campaign tour of faded industrial towns in Pennsylvania. “I get them. I get their sense of being left behind.”

He’s kept a few of Trump’s policies, most notably the tough stance on trade with China. But the difference in the two populisms is illustrated by the predecessor each president chose as a model.

In Trump’s Oval Office, he hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the 19th century nationalist who warred with bankers on behalf of working-class white Americans but also supported slavery and pushed tens of thousands of Native Americans off their ancestral lands.

Biden replaced Jackson’s portrait with one of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Depression-era Democrat who enacted Social Security, vastly expanded the federal government and was reelected three times.

If Biden’s economic agenda were being proposed by full-throated progressives like Sanders or Warren, it might sound extreme to many voters. But his long record as a relatively centrist Democrat could insulate him from that hazard, much as FDR’s aristocratic background allowed him to tack left.

“Voters view him not as a radical, but as a get-things-done moderate,” Biden’s campaign pollster, John Anzalone, told me. “Voters are incredibly transactional right now. They want help and they want it quick.”

Republican opposition to both parts of Biden’s agenda — the short-term relief plan and the longer-term reforms — has been muted so far, mostly because GOP leaders have been too busy with family quarrels over Trump’s legacy to offer much of an alternative to the president’s plans.

That’s unlikely to last. There will be plenty for conservatives to oppose soon enough, beginning with the $15 minimum wage and those new big-government economic programs — not to mention the increase in corporate taxes Biden has proposed to help finance it all.

But as the president nears the end of his first month in office, it’s possible to imagine that by the end of 2021 he could be claiming credit for a rebounding economy and pressing ahead with his broader proposals. If he succeeds, the Biden presidency could be transformative in a way even his supporters didn’t expect.