Today I went to a conference, and as usual was given 200 pages of printouts (some in colour) of people’s slides and papers. Say 7 US cents a page, that’s $14 per person. For less than that, you could supply each person with a USB stick with all the documents on it. That would also save me the trouble of lugging the paper home, and eventually disposing of it a couple of years later when it’s out of date. Or just put it on a website. For those people who want to make notes or whatever at the conference, couldn’t the files be magically beamed to their laptop via wireless?

I don’t really care about the trees (they were planted to make paper in the first place), but these paper handouts don’t seem to be the most cost-effective way to disseminate conference materials. Reallocate the scarce resources!