I thought San Francisco was first for everything green and lookie here..Missouri, the dark horse is a GREEN CHAMPION CITY. Who knew,
that a city in the mid-west would kick our butt and kick those yellow antequated pages to the curb.

You’ve likely seen it before, you come home to find a bag of useless phonebooks on your porch. I realized recently that I haven’t used a phonebook or yellowpages in years - I take them straight to recycling. They are dinosaurs.

I guess if you need a bail bondsmen or a plumber we automatically grab the un-green yellow book like Michael Jackson reached for deprivan. Hey, it’s my first day of parole, I would know:)

JEFFERSON CITY | Regulators said Friday that AT&T Inc. is allowed to quit delivering residential phone books to customer doorsteps in Missouri’s largest cities.

AT&T customers in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas still will receive paper copies of the yellow business pages, which also will include business white pages and government listings.

First of all, phone books are terrible for the environment. Just consider the massive amount of energy consumed for their production and distribution.

This got me thinking - shouldn’t I be able to opt-out of automatic delivery? Wouldn’t there be a significant impact if everyone stopped receiving phonebooks and yellow pages? Apparently the major players pumped out 540 million directories this year. And even though many are 40% post-consumer recycled, phone books still require enormous quantities of paper, ink and oil. When we throw them out–usually within five seconds of finding them on the doorstep–they steal space in the local landfill.

This is insane and wasteful and I want people to know they can opt-out. Below are the numbers to call for the major distributors of phone books and yellow pages (none have online forms as far as I know). Simply call the numbers and tell them you want to opt-out of delivery - it takes a few minutes. I called all the ones below myself.

AT&T/YellowPages (formerly SBC and Bell South):
1.800.792.2665

Verizon (Idearc):
1.800.888.8448

Dex:
1.877.243.8339

Yellow Book:
1.800.373.3280 or 1.800.373.2324

The major players use a tactic called “saturation distribution” that means that you may get books even if you don’t have a land line.

PaperlessPetition.org is one of the only resources I found who is working on this issue. From their site:

    …expedite an end to this needless environmental waste, educate consumers on free and easy alternatives, and shed light on the growing inaccuracy of readership statistics that drive advertisers to still invest in this antiquated medium.

…expedite an end to this needless environmental waste, educate consumers on free and easy alternatives, and shed light on the growing inaccuracy of readership statistics that drive advertisers to still invest in this antiquated medium.

If you’re interested, you can get a badge here.

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