Blog: Green Forests, Cool Planet

Twice a year they arrive on my doorstep with a loud and familiar thump: the “yellow pages” - a book two inches thick and wrapped in plastic so that the pages don’t get ruined by the rain or dew or sprinklers. And when it arrives, I dutifully pull my old dusty, yet unopened book out from underneath my computer monitor, throw it in the recycling bin and put the new yellow pages in its place, where it will hold up the monitor until the next book arrives.

What a waste! It takes 19 million trees, 1.6 billion pounds of paper, 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, and 7.2 million barrels of oil to produce the 500 million directories that are delivered across the nation each year. (Source: YellowPagesGoesGreen.org, an organization working to stop the delivery of unwanted Yellow and White Pages Books.)

And for what? For most of us, the yellow pages are obsolete; there are so many great online resources that are available like switchboard.com or yellowpages.com. These sites provide all of the address and phone number information that we used to gather by flipping through the yellow pages, plus they can provide maps, directions and more.

If you are using one of these (or similar) online directories and no longer wish to receive yellow pages, contact the company that publishes your yellow pages and ask them to stop delivery to your household and/or business.

• Verizon (Superpages/Idearc): 800.888.8448 
• Dex (Yellow Pages): 877.243.8339
• Yellow Book: 800.373.3280
• AT&T/YellowPages (formerly SBC/Bell South): 800.792.2665 for AR, KS, OK, MO and TX only/All other states call 800.848.8000

Or, you can sign up with YellowPagesGoesGreen.org and they will contact your local phone company for you. Their service is free.

Tags: Add new tag

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Go Green!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.