Conference Waste - an easy place to get GREEN

I'm sitting at the O'Reilly and CMP Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and listening to the CEO of Umbria about the power of blogging. Interesting. So I dig through my conference goodie bag - usually worthless but try telling them you don't want it and they shove it at you (at most conferences that is, plus you get the attendee list which all anyone really cares about).

There is a ton of crap in this bag. Not only is the bag worthless, thin, hard to use and meaningless as an item, but inside the bag is a bunch of paper and CD marketing materials from well known brands. I bet that most of this winds up in the garbage of local hotels within 1-2 days. Then, it gets transferred to SF landfills and left to rot with the rest of our garbage.

SO I HAVE A NEW PLAN

1. Contact your conference coordinators (look on the website for the email addresses) and tell them to stop contributing to the incredible waste in this country. They actually have control over a ton of information and have the opportunity to lead in this space. Here's O'Reilly's and CMP's managers (OReilly = Brady Forest, CMP = Jen Pahlka) they are at the front of the program.

2. Don't buy any of the stuff in the marketing package, and mostly DO NOT REGISTER AT THE MARKETING EMAILS AND WEBSITES PROVIDED IN THE PACKAGE. Lack of demand will reduce the effective value of this practice to ZERO and they'll stop doing it.

TIME TO GET ACTIVE AND HELP REDUCE WASTE.

Here are the advertisers by name
eBay Developers Forum
Salesforce.com
Adobe Apollo CD
IBM CD
zimki.com
WebEx
web2corp
oreilly (4 pieces in this bag alone)
Nokia
AOL

Next, stop buying or visiting these sites. Send a message that you are concerned about their business practices. These are good companies, they just need a little push from US, the consumer, to remind them that their choices bear environmental costs, and that those costs must be accounted for in their choice of marketing programs.

Enjoy your day.

Alex