i-sako.com

When I first saw the news about Disney’s new EZ-D disposable DVDs, my reaction was similar to many of the people interviewed for this article at Wired: What a wasteful concept!

The main sales point, I gather, is that you can buy these DVDs at a check-out counter (an impulse purchase, of course), then throw them away after they expire. (Contact with oxygen causes a chemical reaction in the media that causes it to become unreadable within 48 hours after the package is opened.) Because they can be thrown away, the company argues, the customer is spared the burden of returning the discs, as they would need to do if the DVDs had been rented. That may be true, but the media itself—and the air-tight packaging it comes in—would end up in a landfill somewhere, right? Although the company spokesman claims the product is environmentally safe, there’s no way to claim that it is environmentally friendly.

But that doesn’t stop Flexplay (the Disney company behind EZ-D) from trying: Used discs can always be mailed to GreenDisk, they say. Excuse me for pointing out that this pretty much destroys the whole point of the product, which was supposed to be convenience. Not only that, but it’s really kind of lame to push people to buy this kind of product when the rental system already in place is so much less taxing on our resources—and our landfills.

Better technologies are available; this one we can do without. Personally, I see no need for it. Convenience isn’t that important! But if Disney’s pushing it, I imagine we will be seeing EZ-Ds everywhere before long.