How To Get Rid Of Phone Books

In my previous blog entry, Why I'm Starting This Blog, I said I would post an entry for what to do with phone books. Well here it is!

First of all, let me gripe a little about phone books. Why is it that every single home gets at least one huge phone book a year? We never ask the phone companies to get one or sign up for one. They just deliver them to every single house. And as if one phone book isn't bad enough, most of us get at least two different ones. Around here, we get the Verizon Yellow Pages and White Pages, and the Yellow Book. I personally haven't used a phone book in probably 8 or 9 years, any time I need to find a phone number or business I use the Internet. And while I know a lot of people, probably most, use the phone book to find businesses, a large number of us have no need whatsoever for a phone book. Yet the phone company still prints these 2000 page books and goes to the effort of delivering one to every house. Everyone knows that it takes lots and lots of trees to print these. But what about the energy it takes to make the paper, print the books, and deliver the books to everyone?

But worse yet, what is everyone supposed to do with last year's phone book? I see nothing on the cover, back, or first few pages of the book saying where to recycle the phone book. The phone companies are the ones who print these and make all the advertising money, the least they could do is have a program to come and pick up old phone books a week or so after delivering new phone books. I can't find accurate stats on what percentage of phone books get recycled, but I'm sure there are still a large portion of phone books that get thrown in the trash. So much energy gets lost because of this. All of that potentially recyclable paper is permanently disposed of, which means that more energy will be spent making new paper instead of processing recycled paper. And then energy is wasted transporting all of those phone books to your local landfill.

The best solution would be for people who don't want phone books to be able to opt out. Recycling phone books is great but that still takes a lot of energy. If you don't need a phone book, you shouldn't get one. Or at least let people pick which phone book they want instead of getting all. This blog entry, http://www.commoncraft.com/how-stop-receiving-phone-books-and-yellow-pages, has some phone numbers that you can call to not get phone books in the future. I'd be skeptical of this though. The phone book distributors just drop one at every house, they're not looking off of a list for who to deliver one to (evidenced by the fact that people without land lines still get phone books). So what are the chances that they would remember to NOT drop one off at your house? If anyone knows if calling these numbers works or not, please comment!

So when you're stuck with a phone book that you want to get rid of, RECYCLE IT! YellowBook has a link to Earth911 with specific places that you can recycle a phone book at http://corporate.yellowbook.com/recycling/. Just enter your zip code in. Earth911 is a great place to find locations to recycle just about anything.

For those of you here in Arlington, you can drop phone books off in the Mixed Paper dumpsters at one of the two recycling drop off centers. The first is at 530 North Quincy Street, near the Ballston Mall, and the other is at Columbia Pike and South Four Mile Run.