We just received our new phone book, but not through personal choice. It
comes sneakily, quietly arriving without warning on our front step. I weighed the book on my bathroom scale- it wasn’t the most accurate measure, but it weighed
in at around 4 pounds. On the cover of the book I noticed the small
caption ‘Made from 40% post-consumer waste.’ So that means about 1.6
pounds were from waste paper and about 2.4 pounds of paper were former
habitat, destroyed for this book I’ll never use. Great. I use the Internet or get referrals to find the businesses I need. I know I’m not alone in this. Stop destroying carbon sinks for these phone company relics of yesteryear!
I need to stop getting these phone books; I read that calling the phone
company and just asking can work. It seems too simple, let us all try
this week. Normally I don’t even notice the arrival of the phone
books because my spouse moves them from the front door to the recycle
bin at the back door; this time I brought the book in. I managed to
use it for about 20 minutes to keep my toddler quiet as he tore out
the pages…then we moved it into the recycling bin.
In my short ownership of the phone book I did notice the
advertisements for various lawyers on both the front and back covers.
The lawyers were photographed with a fuzzy lens, perhaps to look
kinder and gentler. The whole phone book looks like direct mail to me. So here’s some quick math: if the 6 million Dallas/Fort Worth residents live 4 per household, and each household gets a 4 pound phonebook, and each phone book contains 60% paper from newly cut down trees, that’s 3,600,000 pounds of paper from new trees, or 1800 tons of paper from newly destroyed trees. If we use the potentially faulty (but easy) rule of thumb that 17 trees make one ton of paper, that’s 30,600 destroyed trees. The math is very general, but overall, that’s a lot of dead trees, a lot of habitat loss, a large amount of printing costs, delivery costs…It’s time to get a new marketing director, and to figure out a better way to reach your market. How about a blog?
1 response so far ↓
Look who came calling // Jun 14, 2007 at 11:44 pm
[…] After all my venting about the phonebook that we received last week, what did I find on my doorstep yesterday? Another phone book. This second book was from a different phone company, but with the same lawyer advertising on the front cover. So now I want to revise my analysis: I’ll multiply the total number of trees destroyed to create Dallas/Fort Worth phone books by 2. In honor of those approximately 60,000 fallen trees, today another phone book wings its way to the recycling bin. […]
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