Terrible argument. First stop pretending data centres have no impact on the environment. They do. Second, this is a great use of discs. They are being reused. They aren't just plastic that goes into a dump, it's something people rent and return for others. Plastic in of itself is not a bad material, it's that it's being mismanaged. One use plastics are the biggest offenders, and the amount people use those dwarfs the amount they get from reused rented discs.
It's such a disingenuous argument from people who hate physical media for irrational reasons and want everyone locked into the streamers platforms with no control over their media and streamers who have no incentives to preserve media. If you think that streaming is equivalent in availability to what Netflix DVD had you are mistaken.
Transportation of the disc to the house would probably use more resources than streaming it from a datacenter. But yea, disks could be reused. Spent gas - not.
> The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020.
> New passenger cars generally emit from 90 (smaller cars) to 150 (larger cars) grams of CO2 (yes, it's the weight of the whole carbon dioxide, not just the carbon in it) per kilometer.
Disks could be still better, if you rent 20 of them at once.
It's such a disingenuous argument from people who hate physical media for irrational reasons and want everyone locked into the streamers platforms with no control over their media and streamers who have no incentives to preserve media. If you think that streaming is equivalent in availability to what Netflix DVD had you are mistaken.