Sunday, March 29, 2009

Green Tip: Stop Your Phone Book Delivery


We arrived home from church today to discover a plastic bag and a new phone book in our driveway. It is five pounds of wasted paper that we no longer use. All the info in the phone book is readily available and more likely to be current on-line.

I had recently read something about a new website you can use in the United States to register to stop unwanted phone book deliveries: yellowpagesgoesgreen.org.

This organization is not associated with any phone company, but will contact companies in your area on your behalf for free if you register with them. There is currently no national opt-out system for phone book deliveries. Registering with them will not guarantee that the carrier will actually stop tossing a phone book in your driveway, but it's a step in the right direction in getting the companies to implement a better opt-out system.

It is estimated that about 500 million phone books are delivered the U.S. every year. That's about two for every person. It is also estimated that only about 10% of these get recycled and most never even get used.

If you do not use your phone book at home or at work, please take a minute to register and help your environment.

4 comments:

  1. Good Idea Sue,
    I like having our local phone book...but just one...I don't need phone books for cities that are 1 hour away!
    Robin
    CreationsAnew Photography & Design

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can try to call each phone company that sends a book individually and cancel just the ones you don't want.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I just got ours too and was wondering how I could do this, thanks. I can see phone book companies being something that technology is going to make obsolete very quickly. I would rather Goog411.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Since the phone companies make a lot of money selling ads in their Yellow Pages they don't want anyone to cancel them so they aren't making it easy, but this is the best way right now.

    ReplyDelete