In Tune with the Earth: An interview with Cloud Cult's Craig Minowa

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With your standard CD, if you're buying a plastic jewel case, that's a petroleum-based product; it's not biodegradable. There are all sorts of toxins that are made when you make that plastic. All of the inserts are virgin paper and there's all sorts of toxins in making that glossy-coated. And then it's shrink-wrapped in PVC [polyvinyl chloride], which is one of the most toxic plastics out there. It creates a lot of dioxin when you make the plastic shrink-wrap and it makes dioxin when you destroy it, if you incinerate it. That was just something I couldn't do, so initially we didn't even do shrink-wrapping.

We started off the process by putting out letters to college bookstores, asking them to put a box out with a note on it that asks students to recycle their jewel cases. If you try to take your jewel cases to the recycling center they actually won't take them because there's no way to recycle them. Over time it got to the point that a lot of recycling centers had the Earthology contact info. So when people bring their jewel cases there, the recyclers know, 'Earthology Records recycles them.'

So we get boxes and boxes and boxes of donated jewel cases and sift through them by hand by the thousands, and hand-clean them, and reuse those. We separately print out 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper that we insert into them. We've been working with the University of Illinois for the past few years on that shrink-wrap, and we finally have a biodegradable, biopolymer, corn-based shrink-wrap that actually dissolves in the rain and just makes fertilizer.

With the touring: that opens up a whole can of worms that we had to address. We put solar panels on the van. We got a diesel van, so we've been able to use biodiesel. We figure out how much CO2 we put out with our travel, we figure out how much electricity we use on stage and in hotels, and with the whole process, and we buy enough green energy wind credits from NativeEnergy to compensate for all that. And then we plant enough trees to absorb any of the pollutants that we made on the tour.

How exactly does the farm play into the Cloud Cult/Earthology project?

It's a little organic hobby farm. My wife and I just finished an intense canning session, which was really nice. Basically the goal is to ultimately grow enough that we can sustain ourselves on it, maybe even go to farmers' markets. My wife is an herbalist, so she would like to be able to grow a lot of her own herbs.

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