(A rosewood guitar)
Like many others around the world I love listening and especially playing music. My main instrument is the acoustic guitar, which looks to be like an all natural type of instrument. This is a common held belief, but also a false one. A few of the many and most popular wood types that are used to create acoustic guitars are rosewood, mahogany, ebony, spruce, and maple. The thing that all of these woods have in common is that most of these types of wood come from old forests, mainly in endangered habitats. (gprotab) Also, 40 percent of the wood for ebony and alder wood guitars is sourced illegally (Ecomena).
This mass production of guitars contributes to more illegal logging and biodiversity loss. But, some companies have realized that this is a problem and have switched to more sustainable wood types such as recycled wood, bamboo, domesticated hardwoods, and other types of more sustainable and common wood types. (gprotab) In January of 2017, the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) placed rosewood under protections. These protections affected the guitar industry due to the mass amounts of the limited source of rosewood that these companies need to create rosewood guitars (USITC).
Although this is a big problem, the only thing I can do to help is to just not buy the guitars that are made from those unsustainable wood types. But there is a different problem that I could help with and practice myself. For any non guitarists, picks are the small and usually plastic objects guitarists put in between their fingers while strumming for a clean sound.
(A guitar pick)
I and every other guitarist that I know own many picks, mainly due to their small size and their ease to lose. In one guitarist’s lifetime they will likely have owned hundreds of picks. The plastic from these picks will most likely eventually be tossed in the garbage or lost. Due to this need for many picks, “Combined, manufacturers produce hundreds of millions of picks every year.” (Premier Guitar) Since I have started researching for this blog, me and my roommate have decided that in the Greenbelt, (and after the fact), we will begin to use non plastic and bio-degradable picks. Companies such as Pigtrum create and sell these types of renewable and plant derived guitar picks. This way we can help be more sustainable in the long term with easily replaceable materials.
Overall, the creation of guitars and the gadgets and additions that guitarists use to play is not a very sustainable industry, but it is fixable. I think that these types of very fixable problems are the ones that should be tackled first by sustainability groups or just people who want to try and make a small difference in their own lives. I never thought about how sustainable playing an instrument was. And I suggest to anyone reading this post that if you play an instrument, take a moment to think about how it was made or what you use to play it, and how sustainable or not sustainable that instrument is as a whole.
Picture Citations:
Bedell Guitars