Fri, Apr. 16, 2004
By Andrew LaMar
TIMES SACRAMENTO BUREAU WRITER
By Steve Geissinger and Douglas Fischer, STAFF WRITERS
SACRAMENTO -- Three years ago, two East Bay high tech-type guys got just one too many of those throwaway promotional CDs that come in everything from the mail to cereal boxes.
Their counterattack on what they call an annoying and wasteful problem began with an Internet quest to amass the discs and hit a benchmark Thursday when they dumped nearly 300,000 of the CDs outside the Capitol -- to the applause of lawmakers.
Inspired by John Lieberman and James McKenna of El Cerrito, Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, has introduced an only-in-California-style bill that would require a postage-paid return envelope be included whenever America Online or other firms send unsolicited CDs.
The bill also would force companies to include a postage-paid return mailer with EZ-Ds -- a 48-hour, self-erasing DVD expected to be on sale soon in most stores.
Under the measure, AB2166, which faces its first legislative hearing Monday, plastic CDs could be returned to the company or a recycler.
"We have all received unasked for and unwanted CDs in the mail and thrown them away," Hancock said. "But these are not disposable products. They last for more than 400 years in a landfill. They can instead be reused to manufacture other things."
Though AOL says it runs one of industry's largest internal recycling programs, it annually mails out millions of plastic CDs destined for local dumps.
The company stopped short of opposing the bill Thursday.
"There is a tremendous burden of cost that would be placed on small businesses, as well as large corporations," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham. "But to be very clear, we're still looking at the legislation, still looking to put our thoughts down in a letter to the committee."
Aides to the author of the bill approached McKenna and Lieberman upon learning of their quest to draw attention to the problem with a humor-laced Internet site, NoMoreAOLCDs.com.
They hope to collect 1 million unwanted CDs and dump them on the company's lawn in Dulles, Va. They're almost a third of the way there. This is a created problem, said McKenna. It's not something where we have too much rain or are living in earthquake country. If you don't make the CDs and don't send them out to everyone, you don't have to deal with all the solutions associated with disposing of something that lasts 450 years.
Their anti-CD waste campaign was born during a week in August 2001 when they received six AOL discs in the mail. Renting a movie at a video store, a clerk slipped a seventh into the bag. At home, they found No. 8 in the mailbox.
That night they registered the Web site.
"The only official response we got from AOL is that they would periodically send us CDs," Lieberman said.
Getting the company to stop sending those discs was another matter, Lieberman said.
After being told by a company representative that it was "literally impossible" to take the pair's address off the mailing list, they filed a prohibitory notice with the U.S. Postal Service forbidding future mailings.
Dozens of violations later, the Postal Service filed a complaint with the U.S. Attorney General's Office. But Lieberman and McKenna are still getting CDs.
"I don't have the ability to tell AOL and other corporations to stop sending me mail," McKenna said. "A CD by itself is not a huge problem, but look how much we're able to gather without a huge effort."
AOL's Graham said the company has a toll-free phone number for those seeking to remove their address from AOL's mailing lists. The company also includes an address on every mailing and recycles all CDs it receives back.
But he wouldn't say what percentage of CDs it gets back. And the public currently provides the postage.