Yellow pages waste

It's happened again, and it makes me sick.

Someone has littered my neighborhood with useless heaps of paper in the form of a phone book. In this case it's the Valley Yellow Pages, but there have been others.

We never requested it and yet they dumped it on every local driveway. It would not be ok for a stranger to put an 8-track tape players in every driveway so why is this acceptable?

Valley Yellow pages

I did a little (very little) market research, nobody I asked has used a phone book  in the past year. I haven't used one for at least 4 years. It's sad to think of all of the time, money, and trees that were wasted to do nothing but add to our recycling bins.

I looked up my name in the book and it has our home phone number, but don't bother calling that number. I only really answer my cell number which is not even listed in the book. If you ever need to call me just Google "Eric Haggin" for my actual number, web site, and email address and don't waste time looking in any phone book.

The publisher of the Valley Yellow Pages prints 7.7 million directories every year ! My book has 222 pages, so assuming it's average for all of the areas they serve, that's  1,709,400,000 pages of paper every year. That's an unconscionable waste.

It struck me as funny that the Valley Yellow Pages has offices next to the Neptune Society. Or perhaps it's just my twisted way of seeing things.

Yellow pages office

To be fair, if you do not want one next time the Valley Yellow pages has an opt-out form buried on their web site:

http://www.myyp.com/directories  [ click on "Opt Out" and fill out the form.]

It's too late for this edition, but hopefully it will prevent the next one. Unfortunately they have made it necessary to do it every year! There is no permanent opt-out.

Ok, so I am a Realtor and I know that many Realtors send out lots of fliers and other junk. I have done a bit of that myself, but in the years I have been a Realtor it's probably less that the equivalent of 3 phone books. In the past 2 years I have sent almost nothing (and those I did send were my first class mail). Let's work to show advertisers that paper junk mail of all types are a waste by responding to digital media and intensionally ignoring any sort of junk mail (even mine!)