As part of Blog Action Day, I’ve chosen to tell you about something I’m doing to offset some of the environmental effects of attending a conference.

I’ve spoken at a lot of conferences lately, and every one of them has offered me a lovely conference bag filled with goodies from event sponsors. Most of these things are trinkets designed to get you to remember the name of a company, and many of them come in the form of printed ads. Ads use paper and ink and occasionally even bleach, and most of them are deposited directly into the trash can. Next to junk mail, this has become my #1 source of waster paper (and I’ve all but cured the junk mail issue through GreenDimes).

So for the Voices That Matter web design conference, Miskeeto is adding some paper of its own: a small, 2-fold card that tells attendees that we’ve invested into alternative energy projects via The Green Office to offset the carbon imprint of the conference bag and its contents.

Of course, our 2-fold card is printed on post-consumer recycled paper (no new trees were used to create it), and no bleach was used to make the paper white.

Instead of a flashing yo-yo or rubber bracelet, we’re sticking some peace of mind into the bag.

Considering how incredibly inexpensive it was to do this, here’s my official call-to-action for conference sponsors:

If you must waste all that paper and ink, do something good for the environment to counter balance the damage. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and if you don’t do it, you’re just going to make yourself look bad to someone like me. And if you hadn’t noticed, I like to talk.

(On a related note, Miskeeto is a completely carbon-neutral company, and in doing this, we also invested to offset our plane travel and hotel stays for all these conferences for the span of one year. We’ll do this again when the year is up.)

Posted by Robert on October 15th, 2007