Hand-delivered junk mail

Eight pounds worth of junk mail showed up in my home’s mailbox last Saturday. Know what it was for? It was a useless assemblage of local addresses, phone numbers and adverts I will never even look at. It was, not one, but two Cuyahoga county phone books (one had white pages, and one had yellow.)

We have options to opt-out of telemarketing phone calls, an opt-out option for junk mail, opt-out laws attempting to rule the wilds of email marketing. So where the heck is my opt-out option for these phone books? What is the deal with just burdening me with the chore of now having to recycle 8,432 pages of paper?

752,000 phone books are delivered to residents of the city of Cleveland alone. Now I know people like my mom are out there, she loves her phone books, she’s still trying to figure out how to email me pictures of the dog. And people like my mom need their phone books. But just think, if you asked some of those 752,000 phone book recipients if they really wanted a yellow book—how much time, money and trees they could save? Look at the efforts they go through to reassure you the book is made from recycled paper and inks and what not (see page 3 of the book)—they know the problem is out there.

In case you are still a phone book user, I would recommend the following online services to you, to join this movement of ridding yourself of these post consumer waste recycled books:

• maps.google.com now has a great business look-up feature that incorporates their maps. Some listings even include hours of operation and most include photos of storefronts.


• yellowbook.com has one of the coolest things you could do with a phone back in the day—reverse number lookup. Sort of the passive version of *69—type in a number and see whose it is. You can also do a reverse address lookup as well.
  


• whitepages.com: look up a published land line and you can also see their neighbors, in fact, everyone on their street!
  

But if you feel uncomfortable with these web sites freely publishing your personal information to the web at large, you can remove yourself from them here.

So I’ve gone ahead and asked the phone book company about their plans for people like me who wish to be excluded from their deliveries, I’ll post their response here if I ever get one.

In the meantime, you can bet my plans for this weekend include a trip to my designated phone book recycling drop off point to part ways with my two phone books forever. Or maybe I’ll take a hint from Amy at momadvice.com who gives us some creative uses for unwanted phone books—here’s just one:

Use your phone book to do your crafts on. Open up the book and work on your projects (painting, glitter, or anything else that is messy). When your project is complete, just tear and dispose of the pages.