Comment by vrinsd
3 days ago
I'm sure this makes me seem like a "get off my lawn" type of person but is anyone considering the environmental impact of making almost 2000 "throw away" pieces of electronics just for a convention?
Yes, I get the cool factor and I love blinking lights too, but the low-cost factor comes from the environmental pollution occuring, it's just been pushed over to China.
Are they throw away?
These are programmable devices given to programmers. The rate of these being thrown out or underutilized is so much lower than so much of human activity.
On the scale of hosting a hackathon, a few kgs of badges likely rates below the trash generated for just the take out food in terms of impact.
Maybe we can recognize that this is so minor of an issue that we don’t need to start here, or even really look too deep at this. Let’s fight these problems on a scale where it really matters.