No Thanks, Dex

The other morning I got to the office and found this year’s annual, wasteful offering from Dex—the company that prints phonebooks. Our office received 12 (yes, 12) phonebooks, each in its own little plastic bag.

And like most people, I picked them up and walked straight to the recycling bin and tossed them in. What a waste!

In this era of smart phones and Wi-Fi, printed phonebooks are dinosaurs. Like cassette tapes, the printed phonebook is going the way of the dodo bird.

It boggles the mind to think how much paper and energy is wasted on phonebooks. According to one calculation, approximately 5,000,000 trees are cut down each year to just to make the "white pages." And while I’m recycling all of ours, something like 75% are apparently thrown in the trash. Think of the cut-down forests, the wasted paper, all those plastic bags, and the energy to ship these bulk and heavy books all over the place. It’s amazing.

And, in a crazy twist, many cities actually end up having to use taxpayer/ratepayer money to cover the costs of recycling all these worthless phone books. The city of Seattle calculated that it pays more than $350,000 per year to recycle phone books—and that unwanted phone books make up an incredible 2.7% of all the material picked up by their curbside recycling.

In 2010, the Seattle City Council banned the delivery of unwanted phonebooks and imposed a recycling fee on the phone book publisher of $148 per ton of phone books delivered in the city.

In May 2011, the city of San Francisco followed suit, banning the delivery of unrequested phonebooks.

Seems like an idea whose time has come.  Will any Idaho cities join in?

In the meantime, you can do something. You can register online to “opt out” of receiving phonebooks. Take note, though, simply registering is not enough—you then have to log back in and “manage” your account to actually opt out. 

It's nice to have an option to opt out—but the world would be a better place if you had to “opt in” to get a phonebook.