California Bill Aims to Curb Waste from AOL Disks
If a California legislator has her way, companies that send unsolicited CDs and DVDs through the mail to state residents — we’re looking at you, AOL — will be required to include a postage-paid, pre-addressed envelope that recipients can use to send them back to the company or to a CD-recycling facility. CD mailers offering various and sundry computer-related deals — say, for instance, 1,000 free minutes of Internet access — have become a fixture of modern life, cluttering our mailboxes, magazines, and, most troublingly, landfills, where they take hundreds of years to decompose. State assembly member Loni Hancock, from the lefty haven of Berkeley, Calif., hopes her bill can catch the wave of recent anti-aggressive-marketing measures like the federal Do Not Call list and anti-spam bills.
