Phonebook Madness! Opt out of telephone book deliveries

Funkeemunkeyland, courtesy Flickr

More than 500 million telephone directories — nearly two books for every American — are printed and distributed every year in the U.S., taking with them some 19 million trees.

Earth Talk

Phonebook Madness!

From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk:
I came home today to yet another set of phonebooks at my front door. I feel they are a great waste of paper, especially in this electronic age. How can I stop getting these books? Better yet: How can we get the phone companies to stop making them?

-- Bill Jones, via e-mail

Many of us have little or no use for phonebooks anymore. While such directories are helpful for that occasional look-up of a service provider or pizza place, consumers and businesses increasingly rely on the Internet to find goods and services. Directory publishers usually do make their listings available online nowadays, too, but the books are still money-makers for them as prints ads fetch top dollar even though their effectiveness is waning and much harder to track.

According to the nonprofit Yellow Pages Goes Green, more than 500 million phone directories — nearly two books for every American — are printed and distributed every year in the U.S., taking with them some 19 million trees. Upwards of 1.6 billion pounds of paper are generated to produce the books from these felled trees, while 7.2 million barrels of oil are churned through in creating them (not including the gasoline used for local deliveries). Producing the directories also uses up 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and generates 268,000 cubic yards of solid waste that ends up in landfills (not including the books themselves, many of which eventually end up in landfills in areas where recycling is not available or convenient).

Unfortunately, there is no centralized way for consumers to opt-out of receiving the big books like the National Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing. Most individual yellow and white page publishers have "no deliver" lists they can add you to, but they will not be held accountable if the books show up anyway. The Yellow Pages Goes Green website will find your local/regional directory pages publishers and ask them not to deliver on your behalf. The site warns, though, that there are no guarantees with this either.

For their part, directory publishers insist they have made great strides in recent years to operate in an environmentally responsible manner. The Yellow Pages Association (YPA) and the Association of Directory Publishers (ADP) have collaborated on formal guidelines calling for source reduction in the production of directories, environmentally sensitive manufacturing practices and enhanced recycling programs. About 90 percent of industry members have adopted the guidelines so far. Examples in practice include the use of water-soluble inks and recycling-friendly glues, not to mention forsaking the use of virgin trees in their books (many books are made from recycled old phonebooks, mixed with scrap wood. [See a previous column that discussed this.]

Because of widespread and increasing use of the Internet, many sources of information — from newspapers and magazines to newsletters and, yes, directories — are forsaking print for online placement. So it is really just a matter of time before phone directories follow that lead. In the meantime, asking to be removed from the delivery list of your local directory publisher can only help to hasten that inevitability.

Get the Facts

► 540-million directories are printed annually in the United States.
► 1.79 directories are printed for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
► The average weight of each directory is 3.62 pounds.
► The phone directory industry is worth over $13 billion in the U.S. (that figure doubles to $26 billion worldwide).
► It takes 24-trees to make 1-ton of paper.
► It takes over 19-million trees to make half a trillion directories.
► It takes 380-gallons of oil to produce that ton of paper (over 7.2 billion barrels per 500,000,000 books).
► 3-cubic yards of waste are taken up by one ton of paper (that equates to 1.6 billion pounds per 500,000,000 books).
► Over 270,000 cubic yards of landfill are taken up per 500,000,000.
► 7,000 gallons of water go into the production of one ton of paper.
► 4,000 kilowatts of energy are also needed to make 1-ton of paper (3.2 billion KW hours per 500,000,000 books).

Carbon Footprint Resources

Editor's Note

I highly recommend saving at least one of these archaic books to have on-hand in case of emergency. Computers still don't work without power and in the case of an extended period without power (think Hurricane Katrina) it is always nice to be able to call for emergency services.

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Posted: December 3, 2008