Green Options for MW2008 registration

Don't forget about the Green Options on MW2008 registrations! See http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/register/

This year the Museums and the Web Registration form contains several new options that attendees with an environmental conscience have been urging us to provide for several years.

The first allows a registrant to choose not to receive a "registrants bag" (but to get all the contents). Those who attend a number of conferences each year know that these bags start to litter up their front closet, or that they simply leave them behind in the conference hotel after extracting the program from them. We would like to cut down on the waste - in recent years we've donated left over bags to schools where children from underprivileged homes are able to use them as school bags.

Some registrants prefer not to carry home the Conference Proceedings CD or the Selected Papers volume as well. This year we will provide a box next to the registration desk to receive donated Proceedings/Papers. We will then provide museums and libraries in the less developed world that request them, copies that you attendees donated. This way the copies will get used, rather than being tossed out in Montreal.

The biggest new environmental choice we are offering is for attendees to pay a "carbon offset" for their airfare to the conference. After looking at several programs to which we might contribute, we selected a charitable foundation that doesn't just sequester the carbon (planting trees which eventually will give their carbon back to the atmosphere) but actually makes grants that enable others to create renewable energy sources that would not have been developed otherwise: see carbonzero.ca. We are interested to see how many of us are really willing to make a sizable donation (in the case of Australian round trip travel this amounts to $75!) to pay society back the cost of the carbon we are utilizing to come to the conference. (Since we weren't sure how many accounting offices would like this idea, these charges show up as "Green Option 1", and "Green Option 2" on your invoices).

We are seeking additional ways in which the meeting can be "green". It is quite frightening, when we look at the details, just how much impact a meeting of 700 people can have. Any suggestions for reducing our environmental footprint are welcome. As is discussion of the options we are offering to registrants this year.