The CD had a long life as a support for releasing music albums, movies, games and tons of other types of content, and they still are an important vector able to carry all this information to the final user, but they have one little big problem - unfortunately, they are not biodegradable.

Since we all know that Greenpeace has all eyes on Apple and calls them "a dirty company" that doesn't care for the environment, they would be surprised to find out that iTunes is a weapon that fights to protect the nature, although I am sure this is just a fortunate event. How is this possible? Well, this is what we're going to see next.

The iTunes Music Store is used to distribute music, movies and even games online, and it is obvious that once somebody has bought a music album or a movie from it, a CD copy of that album or movie will remain peacefully in his shelf. When you get bored with an album purchased from iTunes, you can simply forget about it or delete it if you need more drive space, and this won't have any impact on the environment.

On the other hand, if you buy a CD/DVD and you want to throw it away... then we have a problem. As I said, these are not biodegradable, so they need to be disposed of somewhere, but until then, they must be moved to the stores where they are sold. Since the iTunes Store sold over two billion songs, that means 166 million CDs, if we consider an average of 12 tracks per album. These CDs can stack to a height of 1,050 miles and cover an area of 640 acres, even when stacking and compression are added to the equation!

Daily, about 5 million tracks are sold, so over 400,000 CDs are not sold due to this. Since transportation is not done by trucks running on solar energy, and a trailer can carry around 600,000 CDs, we can conclude that Apple's iTunes has spared the world of the pollution caused by almost 300 shipping runs and is saving five more weekly shipments, without including secondary runs! Now, what do you have to say about that, Greenpeace?