It was the final straw. After coming home to yet another stack of Yellow Pages blocking the entrance to her apartment building last year, Aimee Davison couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m breaking up with you, phone book,” she posted on Twitter after stepping over the pile of unsolicited books. “Stop coming to my house, you tree killer.”
But her disdain didn’t stop at the digital realm.
A few days later, as Davison drove past an empty lot in her home city of Montreal, she began to imagine it filled with a mountain of Yellow Pages—a striking visual testament to the waste caused by the clunky, space-hogging 20th-century artifact known as the phone book. “Damn, I should do something like that,” she thought.
So she did.
In the fall of 2010, self-described “digital girl” Davison, with the help of friend Kyle McDonald, searched the streets of Montreal for discarded and unrecycled Yellow Pages—starting, of course, with the ones on her own doorstep. The two filmed the adventure, gathering books and opinions from people on the street regarding the relative usefulness of phone books along the way.
Davison and McDonald easily managed to collect more than 500 unwanted books. They stuffed their take into the back of a U-Haul and drove to the Yellow Pages offices. There, in a clever role reversal, they dumped the entire pile at the company’s front doors. (“Yellow Page Mountain,” a video that documents the stunt, currently has more than 25,000 views on YouTube.)
“They’re junk mail,” says Davison by phone from Montreal. “If they didn’t deliver the Yellow Pages, most people would forget about them. They wouldn’t miss them.”
Indeed, the combination of growing Internet savvy and increased consciousness about conservation may just lead to the end of the big yellow book. According to a recent survey by the Kelsey Group, only 28 percent of teens said they would consult the Yellow Pages first when searching for local businesses. And it’s hard not to notice that the death knell for the item most likely to be used as a computer monitor prop and a child’s booster seat has been tolling louder ever since “Google” became a verb.
Marin County Supervisor Charles McGlashan thinks so. “Given the new Internet era we live in,” he says, “for the most part, phone books are not worth distributing to every household on the assumption that they are being used.”
Let Your Fingers Do The Clicking
McGlashan, who hasn’t opened up a phone book in over a year, believes people should be allowed to request a phone book if they want one, effectively ending delivery to everyone else. He champions what’s known in the rising battle over the telephone book as an “opt-in” program—the strictest of the solutions proposed. The phone book companies, who turn a tidy profit on Yellow Pages advertising, are fiercely fighting opt-in programs, instead hoping to convince people that “opt-out” programs would have the same effect. Meanwhile, the stacks of unwanted phone books continue to pile high.
Yellow Pages distribution in the United States currently stands at 540 million—more than the entire population of the U.S. That statistic alone accounts for the stacks of phone books gathering mold on streets and sidewalks across the country, and one for which we can blame the Supreme Court.
Those over the age of 30 remember a time when there was just one phone book, published and distributed by the telephone company. But in the 1991 ruling Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor wrote that the information and facts collected in the phone book are not subject to copyright, explaining the contents as “devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity.” The decision opened the floodgates, allowing anyone with Quark and an entrepreneurial spirit to republish the Yellow Pages and collect advertising revenue.
Locally that’s resulted in a tidal wave of Yellow Pages. Jeffrey Smedberg, recycling coordinator for the Santa Cruz County public works department, estimates that each of the three directory publishers with a presence in the county prints at least 100,000 copies of the phone book to distribute to residents and businesses. In a report on the subject he wrote, “By a conservative estimate, each of the directory publishers are responsible for the generation of 300 tons of waste annually in Santa Cruz County.”
“I see it almost as blackmail,” he says. “A new phone company comes to town and they say, ‘You don’t want to be left out of the phone book, do you?’ So businesses are forced to buy three ads for three different books, when the information in all of them is the same.”
Greg Pearson, landfill superintendent for the city of Santa Cruz, estimates that at least half of the books get recycled. “I would probably say 50 to 75 percent [of phone books] get recycled through us.” He adds that the real problem with recycling phone books is the plastic sheaths they come in.
But might the rush to relegate phone books to the historical basement be too rash? Not everyone has access to the Internet or even a computer, and even those who do may not have the skills to efficiently sort through a list of Google results, which are famously incomplete and sometimes erroneous.
Ammon Shea, author of The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, says that he is “loathe” to see the White and Yellow Pages on the decline.
“I’m somewhat confused as to why this particular book arouses such umbrage in people,” says Shea by phone from New York. “Newspapers probably waste a considerable amount of paper and yet there are very few calls from people saying that The New York Times should stop publishing.” Shea is right. According to a 2009 Municipal Solid Waste in the United States Report by the EPA, newspapers generated about 5,060 tons of waste, while telephone directories generated 650 tons.
Yet newspapers offer a built in “opt-in” system in the form of subscriptions, while Yellow Pages seem to be invading our lives. In response, cities across the United States have started to pass anti–phone book ordinances. In Oct. 2010, Seattle passed a law that made opt-out programs mandatory. In Santa Cruz County, authorities were weighing a law this time last year requiring distributors of unsolicited advertising material to collect that which hadn’t been claimed—in other words, to pick up after themselves. In light of a looming ordinance, the county’s three phone book distributors promised to self-police. According to Smedberg’s report, two of the companies—Yellow Book and Valley Yellow Pages—performed fairly well at this. The third, AT&T, starts its annual delivery in May. County officials will be watching.
Throwing The Book Back At Them
If Supervisor David Chiu has his way, San Francisco will be next in line for a phone book ordinance. More than 1.5 million phone books are sent out to San Francisco residents every year, and according to multiple sources, a majority end up in the recycling bin. Last month, Chiu declared Yellow Pages to be a cause of “neighborhood blight,” and proposed legislation that would effectively ban the distribution of unsolicited phone directories in the city. The law would require Yellow Pages distributors to get approval from residents and businesses before delivery—an “opt-in” program—and offenders could face fines in the hundreds. If the ordinance is passed, it would the first of its kind in the nation.
The Yellow Pages Association, the trade group that lobbies for the $14 billion telephone directory industry, has already responded with claims in the San Francisco Chronicle that such an ordinance would be “an infringement on our constitutional rights—the right to distribute speech.” The same trade group, along with other lobbyists, helped to bring down a similar legislative proposal by Sen. Leland Yee in 2009. The Yellow Page Association lobbied heavily against Yee’s statewide mandatory opt-in program; it was trounced on the senate floor. (Anti–phone book bills have also died in North Carolina, Florida and New Mexico.)
In an act that to an average observer might appear counterintuitive, the Yellow Pages Association now sponsors the website Yellowpagesoptout.com, where one can opt out of receiving directories from their local publishers. The website boasts links to sustainability reports and information about how to recycle phone books.
But by promoting an opt-out program, the Association is being calculating. Shea addresses the issue of opt-in vs. opt-out in his book, outlining that only 7 percent of the population in Norway chose to opt out of receiving phone books when a similar program was implemented there—and this in a country where environmental consciousness is a way of life.
“Very few people will opt out because of laziness,” says Shea, blaming human nature. “Whenever you ask people to do something, it’s going to be a very low percentage that actually do it.” Unless more aggressive opt-in programs are implemented, he suggests, phone books will continue to pile on front steps.
David Chiu’s opt-in solution, by contrast, would make the phone book publishers do all the work, meaning that soon, the Yellow Pages, at least in San Francisco, could be the ones making first contact.
According to Ammon Shea, the phone book isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, no matter which type of law is enacted. Even if the books are destined for the recycle heap, torn apart in YouTube stunts or used as parking stops, a large enough segment of the population still relies on access to the books rather than the Internet—plus, he notes, the billions of advertising dollars generated by Yellow Pages are enough to keep people in the business of advertising and being advertised to.
“It’s kind of an unstoppable force,” says Shea.
But if activists like Davison have their way, the fall of the phone book will be inevitable. “I get frustrated because there are alternatives,” says Davison. “If people are still receiving the Yellow Pages when they don’t use them anymore, they are complicit in the environmental costs of printing the book.”
With additional reporting by Maria Grusauskas
