I’ve been thinking about this for a while and had to get it out. A huge chunk of kpop fans buy albums purely to pull the photocards and other goodies inside, and the actual album itself ends up either sold for basically nothing or just thrown away. And if it’s a bare album with no extras, it often doesn’t even sell. People just toss it.
That’s a staggering amount of plastic, paper and packaging going straight into landfills on a global scale. Even with some labels offering QR versions like Weverse Albums as an alternative, most releases still come with physical photocards, card holders, booklets, folded posters and sticker sheets. The CD might be gone but the packaging waste is still very much there.
I genuinely think labels have a responsibility to rethink this at the source. Not just swap the CD for a QR code and call it a day but actually cut down on the volume of throwaway packaging that exists solely to justify a higher price point. Some groups release five or six different versions of the same album, each with different photocard sets, which is clearly designed to push fans into buying multiple copies. That’s a calculated decision with real environmental consequences.
And honestly labels are not completely clueless here. They have sales data, preorder numbers, regional demand breakdowns. They know which versions move and which ones sit. So at some point you have to ask why certain versions still get overproduced to the point where unsold copies end up in bulk discount bins or just thrown out. If the data exists to predict demand more accurately and it clearly does, there is no real excuse for the volume of physical waste that keeps getting generated every single comeback cycle.
And for fans who already have stacks of bare albums sitting around with nothing in them, the worst outcome is just dumping them. Even selling them for 2 or 3 dollars each on something like bunjang global or mercari, fb marketplace is genuinely better than contributing to a landfill. Someone will actually use it. Someone might be a new fan who just wants the music and doesn’t care about the extras.
Yes, what people buy is ultimately their own choice. But if this pattern keeps going for another few decades at the pace kpop is growing globally, the waste adds up to something pretty serious. The industry built this buying behavior on purpose. It should be on them to fix it, not just quietly pivot to digital formats while still shipping five physical versions per release.
submitted by /u/Southern_Pin644
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