The other day I found two large packages in front of my house and like millions of other Americans I was very annoyed. They weighed a total of 15.5 pounds. Inside each large plastic bag was the same set of three telephone white and yellow page books from Verizon, my phone provider. Why two sets? Because I have a separate number for my fax machine. Did I request these phone books? No. Do I use them? Hardly ever. At most, perhaps two or three times a year. Why? Because like so many other Americans I immediately go the Internet when I seek information, not phone directories. Even if I did use them, why would I need two sets?
In a society that supposedly is committed to going "green" with environmentally sensible practices and products, the automatic delivery to homes of large phone books, typically several different ones during the year, is an incredible waste of trees, paper, ink and energy. Not to mention an enormous waste of money by the companies that pay for advertisements in these phone books that apparently still make publishing and distributing them a profitable enterprise by phone and other companies.
An incredible fraction of these cumbersome phone books get dumped immediately into trash cans or, hopefully in millions of cases, into recycling bins. From what I have read on various websites and conversations with friends, my disgust and discarding of most of the books received is very typical behavior. Just as phone land lines are rapidly disappearing from wide public use as they are replaced by cell phones, so has phone books become old-world, old-technology and environmentally stupid and wasteful products.
The obvious solution is to legally require companies to obtain an affirmative request for phone books from consumers, without which they should not be permitted to invade my home and privacy by dumping the phone books on my property, and burdening me with the chore of getting rid of them.
Though there are some phone numbers you can supposedly call to opt out of receiving phone books, from comments posted on websites by angry people this procedure does not seem to work effectively. I tried calling one number and immediately discovered that the company does not publish all phone directories. When I went to the Verizon website, by the way, I could find no opportunity to opt out of receiving their phone books. Ditto at the yellowpages.com site, which, however, did have material touting recycling of their books.
But at yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/ you can at no cost sign up to opt out of all phone books. This group also presents some eye-popping information, such as 540 million phone books are printed annually, requiring the cutting down of 19 million trees and the use of 1.6 billion pounds of paper as well as using 7.2 million barrels of petroleum and 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. But the directory industry makes $13.6 billion annually. To the extent that people are not using them much anymore, however, advertisers are wasting a ton of money at a time when they can ill afford this.
My point is that expecting this phone book industry to voluntarily make it easy for people to stop getting them and thus greatly reduce distribution (that is the basis for advertising rates) is unlikely. We need lawmakers at the state and federal level to take action. Just as the government has created a national no-call registry to allow people to stop unwanted marketing phone calls, the government should likewise create a system to make it very easy to stop the delivery of unwanted white and yellow page phone directories. Let us not forget that considerable taxpayer money is spent by local governments disposing in landfills or processing for recycling the millions of phone books discarded yearly, not just the unwanted ones, but the old ones being replaced by new ones year in and year out! Thus there is a sound public policy reason for the government to act. All we need is a groundswell of public demand for good legislation and hope that the lobbying efforts of phone and advertising companies does not once again pervert the political system.
Finally, in case this thought has not hit you yet, remember that ordinary phone books do provide cell phone numbers of people and, increasingly, more and more people only have cell phones, making white page books steadily more useless. Why are they not listed? Cell phone numbers are confidential because they are protected by law. Thus legitimate cell phone number directories are restricted to law enforcement and licensed investigators. For a fee, of course, you can find websites where you can find a cell phone of an individual or who a cell phone number belongs to. I just tried one such website and discovered it would cost $30 to obtain the cell number of a specific person.
For a greener America , let's look forward to far fewer phone books, first to lug into our homes and then to lug into trash or recycling containers. At the very least, many people will find it appropriate to limit phone books to just one company, and increasingly over time more people will choose to eliminate them altogether. Phone books face the same basic creeping loss of mass appeal that newspapers, book publishers, music recording companies, and TV networks are contending with. Times change. Especially when consumers face economic hardship.
Joel S. Hirschhorn has succeeded as: a full professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison; a senior staffer, U.S. Congress (Office of Technology Assessment); head of an environmental consulting company; Director of Environment, Energy and Natural Resources, National Governors Association; now an author and consultant. Recent books are: Sprawl Kills - How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health and Money, and Delusional Democracy - Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government. He has published hundreds of articles in newspapers, magazines, journals and on many web magazine sites. He has given hundreds of talks at a wide range of conferences worldwide. He focuses on American culture, politics and government, and health issues.
Amen! Not only do the advertisors spend a ton placing ads in these books and then pass that cost to the consumer, the money to produce these huge books has to come from somewhere as well. Great article.
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