I just found out about YellowPagesGoesGreen.org. Next to Catalog Choice it is the best tip I’ve been able to provide to you this year!
Yellowpagesgoesgreen.com is helping municipalities and local governments around the country establish ordinances to mandate Yellow Pages and White Pages only be delivered to home and offices that ask for them. Municipalities and local government that provide trash services are extremely concerned about the landfill cost and why they have to absorb the cost of handling the telephone directories.
You too can ask them to stop killing trees and delivering them to your front door. Sign up on their web site, and spread the word!
Wendy:
For the record, that groups activity has not lead to a single piece of legislation being approved anywhere yet.
And while the popular myth is that this industry is responsible for the neutering of forests, the reality is the Yellow Pages industry doesn’t knock down any trees for its paper!!! Let me repeat that – they don’t need to cut any trees for their paper supply. Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills. Not only that, as wood chips decompose, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas closely associated with global warming.
For more information go here: http://www.yptalk.com/archive.cfm?ID=322&CatID;=3
It’s not just about paper, Ken. It’s about the total cost of producing an outdated book that no one really uses anymore. The electricity needed to run the plant to produce the books, the fuel used to deliver the book from manufacturing to the point of distribution, and then the fuel used by each subdistributor to drive to each area where they then spend countless hours deliving them by hand to every door. And then of course there is the energy I expend to take it to my recycling bin, and the energy to then recycle this stupid book into something that is more useful – like TOILET PAPER. Since your profile is not available to other Blogger members of the public to view I can only ascertain that you are somehow associated with the yellow pages industry based on the link you provided. I am sure the industry is very grateful there are people like you to “correct” people like me on the facts. But it really is more the cost of the energy and the fuel used in production of the books that is more harmful than any loss of trees.