Yellow is not Green

Jeana found this on WiseBread.

In this day and age of the internet, free Google 411 and a host of other paperless directory services, what use do the big, fat phone directories serve? I don’t know about you, but when I get those large plastic bags filled with 3lb phone books, I usually put them straight in the recycling bin. We never use them. Now a website similar to the National No-Call registry is asking you to sign up and stop receiving these archaic books.
The facts speak loud and clear; the massive amount of money and resources the phone directory industry sucks up is phenomenal. This, from YellowPagesGoesGreen.org :
• 540 million directories are printed annually in the United States.
• The average weight of each directory is 3.62 lbs.
• 1.79 directories are printed for every man, woman and child in the US.
• The phone directory industry is worth over $13 billion in the US (that figure doubles to $26 billion worldwide).
• It takes 24 trees to make 1 ton of paper.
• It takes over 19 million trees to make half a trillion directories.
• It takes 380 gallons of oil to produce that ton of paper (over 7.2 billion barrels per 500,000,000 books).
• 3 cubic yards of waste are taken up by one ton of paper (that equates to 1.6 billion lbs per 500,000,000 books).
• Over 270,000 cubic yards of landfill are taken up per 500,000,000
• 7,000 gallons of water go into the production of one ton of paper.
• 4,000 kilowatts of energy are also needed to make that ton of paper (3.2 billion KW hours/500,000,000 books).
So much money, so many resources, all for nothing.  However, if we all do something about it, maybe we can speed that process up.  Simply click on this link and you’ll be directed to an opt-out page where you can opt out of both the yellow and white pages.