OSCON 2008: Environmentally Unfriendly
- Wed Jul 23 2008
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I received my OSCON 2008 registration package yesterday, and as with past years I received a bag filled with useless crap. There’s a foam rocket, there’s some bizarre squishy thing, there’s a cheap plastic pen, and there’s the usual assortment of inserts, advertisements, magazines, and other crap that I’m not going to use or look at.
The kicker is a big glossy magazine from Web Host Industry Review. That wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s the “Green Edition”. Fuck you, a glossy magazine that’s going to get thrown in the garbage by 90% of people receiving it is not green.
Why can’t O’Reilly put all this information on a USB flash drive and give those to people? Flash drives are cheap, you can cram all kinds of information on them, and they’re useful! If I don’t want the free copy of The Linux Journal, I don’t have to throw it away (or best option, recycle it), I just delete it from the flash drive. And then I have something useful to take away from the conference!
So come on O’Reilly, start using USB flash drives!
4 Responses to “OSCON 2008: Environmentally Unfriendly”
Wed Jul 23 2008
8:27 am
They don’t put the stuff on flash drives because 90% would delete it without ever looking.
By using paper they made even you remember the brand “Web host industry review”.
Wed Jul 23 2008
8:54 am
I guess that’s the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” option?
Fri Jul 25 2008
1:15 am
There is still a significant environmental cost to flash drives - especially if they’re cheap! Consider the raw materials (including nasty chemicals), manufacturing and shipping costs to make the drives in the first place.
Also, if they’re cheap, they’ll probably be 128Mb large or less, which is useless for most people and will therefore get disposed of pretty quickly in any case (or break and get thrown away, coz they’re cheap).
There’s no easy solution, except for stopping producing things in the first place - whether it be magazines, foam rockets, flash drives or o’Reilly dildos…
Fri Jul 25 2008
8:48 am
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