[OSGeo-Conf] Awake some awareness on leaving waste and raise our CO2 footprint after F4G events

[Till Adams]

Hi Eli,

Thanks for yur repliy (and also to all the others)

I totally agree in this point:


> There are things like this that I think are best addressed gradually
> year after year.  However, FOSS4G is not really an annual conference.
> Or it is an annual conference for attendees, but not organizers.  The
> conference starts more or less from scratch each year with a new LOC.
> Moving to institutionalize some of the FOSS4G LOC functions that would
> provide continuity from year to year could enable more focus on
> worthwhile issues like this.  There would be other benefits too.

and I also see a lot of benefits in changing that over time - BTW:
that's the way we do @fossgis: We have a more or less core tea, that
organizes our conference (with 300-400 people) year for aear and
changing LOC's. That makes many things much easier...

Till

> Best regards, Eli
>
> On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 6:09 AM, Till Adams <till.adams at fossgis.de> wrote:
>> Dear ConfComm!
>>
>> There is one issue I'd like to mention and perhaps this is also a topic
>> on that we, as a responsible community, should adress to.
>>
>> Recently I've been to FOSS4G Europe in Paris and I recognized, that a
>> lot of one-way cups and non-returnable bottles were offered during
>> breaks. Thinking back to F4G Europe in Como in 2015 there was even
>> single-use tableware offered for lunch.
>>
>> To make that clear: My goal is not to ask the organizers of the named
>> conferences for justification !!! Both conferences have been phantastic
>> events!
>>
>> I'd like more to awake our environmental awareness somehow:
>>
>> We also had this issue on a FOSSGIS few years ago; a lot of single-use
>> stuff was used for break-caterings. Since this conference, we ask
>> organizers to only offer recycable tableware and bottles on
>> FOSSGIS-conferences.
>>
>>
>> When on the one side one of the goals of our community is to contribute
>> to a better world, it makes not much sense, when we leave amounts of
>> waste behind us and have a raising CO2-footprint after every of our events.
>>
>> For Bonn we decided not to offer any non-recycable stuff, we also asked
>> attendees to balance their CO2-emmission because of flights on a
>> voluntary base (eg. atmosfair). To be honest, I don't know if anybody
>> did, but at least we tried.
>>
>> Maybe that's because I am german and although we sell fraudulent
>> diesel-cars, we have a favour for recycable bottles, cans and everything
>> (even French winemakers put a green dot on their bottles, to indicate,
>> that they are recycable in Germany ;-)) and I also know, that it is
>> often not that easy to have this offer in other countries as well - but:
>>
>> How about adding a topic "Environmental Responsibility" to our
>> "Conference Manual" and encourage future LOC's to have an enhanced eye
>> on these kind of topics? We also might request that future bids include
>> an abstract on how to handle this issue based on the local
>> possibilities. It's up to every ConfComm-member, how to include that
>> into his/her voting.
>>
>>
>> Till
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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