Well - yesterday afternoon, Hubby opened the front door and there it was. In a white plastic bag it looked rather innocent but - it was ANOTHER phone book! This was a HUGE sucker too! Just look at it!
Three and a half inches (or so) of yellow pages to replace the three and a half inches (or so) of yellow pages we got from the SAME COMPANY in January! Has the information changed so much in five months that we need another phone book?
How many trees are cut down to produce this behemoth anyway? Are there groves of special "phone book trees" planted especially for this purpose? Why are the environmentalists not jumping on these phone book companies for overuse of paper? I am sure that global warming isn't being helped by all these phone books!
Just look at our phone book cabinet. That is a double stack of phone books - one behind the other. Just what on earth are we supposed to do with all of this information? If I started reading right now I doubt if I would finish up before yet another of the horrid things showed up on my doorstep! And do you think we actually dig through this cabinet to find the "right" phone book when we need to look something up? No - we turn on the computer and "Google it!"
Hubby did get rid of the phone book from January - which I am sure was sooooo terribly outdated by this time of the year! His "one in - one out" rule seems to be keeping the books under control - for now!
Hubby also had a good idea which might save the trees and space. Why don't the phone book companies offer a choice of the actual book or a CD-ROM? CDs would take up way less space, are more in step with today's technological world, and wouldn't kill quite so many trees.
Of course, I don't know what kind of pollution is produced when manufacturing a CD-ROM.
Trisha
Voice Update:
Despite my funk of yesterday, Hubby said that my voice was stronger last night than it has been for the past couple of days. That was good! I personally felt that I was "breaking up" on a couple words. *sigh* more practice. I will admit that over all, my voice is still EXCELLENT compared to where it was when I started speech therapy! YEAH!
2 comments:
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. Paper manufacturing thus puts these chips to good use. Many paper providers will also use 5% or less of recycled directories in their paper creation.
Ken-
Thank you for the clarification. It does make me feel better about all of the unwanted, un-asked for, and un-used phone books that I receive.
I still think that ANY distribution of printed material which is unwanted is a waste of paper (I could go on about unwanted junk mail also - but I won't). True, Hubby and I recycle the phone books when we get rid of them but isn't it better to cut the demand in the first place?
While I understand that logic for phone books from different companies and applaud them for their money-making and ad-selling skills, how many phone books covering the same geographical area does one person or household honestly need?
Isn't this another case of a materialistic society assuming that everyone needs MORE?
I would rather the wood chip waste be put to other purposes - book which are bought by people who actually want them and will use them perhaps.
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