Do Yellow Pages have you seeing red?

Herb Weisbaum • Profile • E-mail

It happens several times a year in neighborhoods all across the country – telephone directories magically appear. They’re tossed on porches, dropped by mailboxes, and piled up in the entranceways to apartments and condos. In rural areas, they’re sometimes left along the side of the road. No one asks if you want them. They just show up!

You can say “no" to telephone sales calls. You can reduce the amount of junk mail you get. You can even stop unwanted offers for pre-approved credit cards. But what if you don’t want any more phone books?

Keith Childs contacted me when his neighborhood in Renton, Wash., got blanketed with phone books. “It looks terrible. It’s just plain ugly and I’m tired of it,” he says. “These phone books will sit here for weeks or months. They’re an eyesore.”

When Denver architect Paul Karius needs a phone number he jumps on the Internet. Even so, he still got a pile of them at his office from three different companies. “That’s ridiculous!” he says. Karius is so upset about the waste, he’s launched a Web site: stopthephonebooks.com.

According to the Yellow Pages Association, about 615 million phone books were distributed in the U.S. last year. Being an architect, Karius wanted to visualize what that would look like. If you stacked the books on top of each other (he assumed the average thickness is 2 inches) that would be a pile 19,000 miles high! Stacked end-to-end, he says, it would circle the earth more than four times!

Phone books are not dead
The companies that publish phone directories realize they have a public relations problem on their hands. They also know a growing number of people use the Internet to find phone numbers. But they insist print directories, a $14 billion dollar a year industry, are still a valuable resource for both consumers and business owners.

Opt out! The directory publishers listed below make it possible for you to stop receiving their books, but they don’t make it easy. None of the menu options includes “opting-out” of getting our directory. Follow this roadmap and you should get to a customer service representative who can help you. — ATT/ Yellow Pages: 1-800-479-2977 — Verizon: 800-555-4833, press 4, then 5, then 2 — DEX: 1-877-243-8339, press 2 — Yellow Book: 1-800-929-3556, press 2

“For local businesses, the print directory is still a very important means of connecting with their customers,” says Peter Larmey, a spokesman for the DEX directory.

The Yellow Pages Association claims about 46 percent of the adults in this country use a phone book in an average week.

“The print directory has a long, long future in front of it,” says Larry Angove, President and CEO of the Association of Directory Publishers. “While Internet Yellow Pages usage is going up, it’s still only a fraction of what printed directory usage is today.”

Something has to be done
The National Waste Prevention Coalition is working to make it easy for you to opt out of getting unwanted phone books. “For some people, it’s just five or 10 pounds of waste," says Tom Watson, a recycling expert with the Solid Waste Division in King County, Wash., who coordinates the coalition.

At least 660,000 tons of phone books are distributed across the country each year. “That’s a sizeable amount of paper when a lot of it is unwanted,” Watson says. And the recycling rate is not that high. Even in the Seattle-area, a national leader in recycling, it’s estimated that less than 40 percent of old or unwanted phone books go in the recycling bin. The rest wind up in the trash.

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