Yes, I get the cool factor and I love blinking lights too, but the low-cost factor comes from the environmental pollution occuring, it's just been pushed over to China.
These are programmable devices given to programmers. The rate of these being thrown out or underutilized is so much lower than so much of human activity.
On the scale of hosting a hackathon, a few kgs of badges likely rates below the trash generated for just the take out food in terms of impact.
Maybe we can recognize that this is so minor of an issue that we don’t need to start here, or even really look too deep at this. Let’s fight these problems on a scale where it really matters.
We're also hoping the expansion connector might be used by other boards - i2c, 4 fast gpios, 5 slow gpios/pwms, 700ma of 3.3 power. A standard similar to SAO for identification via i2c flash