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Air Date: Mar 4, 2003
Reporter: Clifton Joseph
Producer: Maxine
Sidran
Researcher: Louisa
Jaslow
If you
have an address, you’ve found CDs in your mailbox, offering
three months of free AOL service. They’re not
recyclable
and most wind up in landfills — where they don’t degrade
for hundreds of years. People are inventing some creative ways to
deal with the situation.
AOL
recruits new users by dispatching millions of CDs offering three
free months of service. Deploy one of them in your computer and
you have enlisted into the AOL internet access machinery. If you’re
not interested in signing up and hearing “you’ve got
mail,” then you’ve got garbage.
Those
ubiquitous AOL CDs have so many sneaky ways of arriving unsolicited
into your homes:
- through
computer magazines
-
orders from Amazon.ca
- the
Sears catalogue
- in
a modem package
- the
local newspaper
- flyers
fromthe Royal Bank
The
AOL cds that don’t make it into your home lounge around seductively
— in places like Canadian Tire, Future Shop, Radio Shack,
the post office — begging you to take them home and hook them
up with your computer.
When
overwhelmed by a seemingly endless barrage of AOL CDs, creative
minds let their juices flow, and use them for all kinds of artistic
endeavors. There are Web sites showcasing these works of art.
Toronto’s
Jed Goldberg, president of the environmental awareness
group
Earth Day Canada says the CDs can't be recycled — they have
plastics and metals in them.
"It
isn’t a clean type of recyclable," Goldberg told Marketplace.
There’s
a protest movement that’s started online. The two full time
IT workers behind NoMoreAOLCDS.com have, like latter day Davids,
declared war on the AOL Goliath.
Their
slingshot battleplan? Collect one million unwanted CDs from angry
recipients, deliver them to AOL headquarters and say: "This
is your garbage. You do something about it."
Canadians,
like Burnaby’s Brad Salomons, have answered the call. Brad’s
been bombarded by a blitzkrieg of those CDs.
"You
can complain all you want, but these guys are actually taking action
and gonna turn around and going to give AOL their just desserts."
Jim
McKenna is one of the driving forces behind NoMoreAOLCDS.com. He
says receiving eight AOL CDs in one week got the movement going.
"We’re
trying to make a point. They’ve created
'We're trying to make a point."
Jim McKenna, NoMoreAOLCDs.com |
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something
that I see as garbage and put it on my lawn. So we’re going
to take the CDs from all the folks who agree with us, package it up,
take them back to the rightful owners."
Marketplace
tried
to get AOL to comment on the issue. But the company declined.
McKenna
has about 120,000 AOL CDs in his two car garage. The goal —
a million, which would cover the floor of the garage, knee-deep,
and would weigh about 18 tonnes.
The
jaded might see their final offensive as a misguided merry throng
of wanton pranksters in one tonne trucks bucking up against a predictably
unresponsive corporate behemoth. But Brad Salomons is a true believer
in the protest.
"If
enough people do something about it, enough people stand up, AOL’s
got to respond to that."
In
the meantime, the campaign marches on, as the arsenal of unwanted
AOL CDs bulges steadily towards the million disk mark.
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