It’s happened to every student on this campus. You walk into the mail room in the Commons, stand in front of your mailbox for a few moments (or minutes) trying to remember your combination, and then finally get it open to find junk mail. You curse the spam gods for a few minutes and then—if you’re a nice, environment-friendly person—walk over to the recycling bin and deposit it there. If you’re lucky and get there early in the day, this is a trivial process. But for those that arrive later, it can be quite an ordeal, with piles of unwanted flyers for everything ranging from saving your soul with BASIC to surveys on Campus.News spilling everywhere and sometimes trapping unwitting students under masses of papers.
When I found the latest piece of crap in my mailbox—and no, I don’t mean the ice cream cone some troglodyte crammed in there—I had to stop and ask myself: How effective are these flyers to justify all the waste? I’m sure that of the hundreds of flyers distributed when someone advertises through the mailroom, only a handful are actually brought back to a dorm room, and those are more than likely used as rolling papers. Is there any end at all to justify the means?
The campus does have a nice e-mail notification system set up for this purpose: Rensserv. Instead of being distributed to everyone on campus, it is only sent to the people who wish to be notified of what’s going on around RPI. There’s no wasted paper; it’s all electronic. It’s easy to sign up for, and easy to distribute notices through. The instructions are available on the DotCIO’s webpage. It’s also much easier and cleaner to get rid of an unwanted e-mail than leaflets, and you get the satisfaction of deleting the person’s message that could only be matched by burning the junk mail, which is slightly impractical. Baleted.
But if for some reason nostalgia strikes you, or you long for the smell of copier toner and want to distribute notices on paper, is it really necessary to print hundreds? Is this more effective than hanging up a few dozen flyers at strategic locations around campus? Or even just two, one at either end of the mailroom so students see them when they leave? How can anyone say that distributing a flyer to every student with a mailbox is more effective than this when 95 percent of them end up in the trash? It’s simply a waste of paper, and in today’s world—with national parks being opened up to oil drilling and roads—the last thing we need is more logging. And if you’re not one of those people who are concerned about silly things like oxygen, at least think of the poor student trapped under those piles of paper before you print up some flyers.
