apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

recycle the old one when the new one comes in... *CLUNK*

We moved to our new apartment in December. Since then we've received 7 phone books! It makes me crazy! I don't know what to do with them and neither does anyone else...they usually just pile up in the hallways and people use them to prop open the doors when they are moving stuff!

I am delighted to share a solution I just stumbled upon last week for (a) the what-to-do-with-the-phone-book problem, and (b) how do I add more "brown" to my compost pile ... rip those big yellow tomes up a few pages at a time and toss them in with the banana peels and orange rinds. Give it a few months to bake and ... viola ... compost!

I've been wondering if its possible to call up Yellow Pages and put myself on a 'do-not-receive' list. I hate having to recycle it - even though that is the smartest solution. I'd rather just not receive it at all. (That, and the five other 'neighbourhood' speciality publications they foist on my stoop.)

Has anyone done that - phoned them to ask NOT to receive the book?

Actually, I always keep the best one, just in case I don't have internet for some reason. I mean, what if the electricity is out and I really want Chinese delivery? What then?

I literally pick it up off my stoop and drop it into the recycling bin. It makes me so angry. I just can't even fathom the number of phonebooks going to waste these days.

Shameful.

I agree with Allsunday, sometimes it's faster to open the book and find a number, including emergency numbers (at least the lesser used ones of course) Imagine, turn on the computer, wait for Windows, open the net, search "emergency plumbing service" "SOS giant squid attack victims" etc etc...

When we get new ones, we toss the old ones in the recycling bin!

I understand the need to have a phone book. You can rely on your cellphone address book and internet ALL the time. But do I really need to receive 3 separate books a year? And 2-3 copies EACH on top of that?
Seems like an awful waste to me.

I tend to get two every year. I keep one in my apartment and one in my car (which I find I use even more than the one in the apartment). I recycle the old ones.

My neighbor uses them for some sort of art project, so I (and all my friends) give them to her.

There is a way to get off the various yellow pages mailing lists and apparently I've lost the link. I bet if you look on one of the various lifehack sites you'll find it. There's a phone number that you call. If I can find it, I'll post it here.

Ahh the joy that is internet... http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/

Since I moved into my current apartment almost two years ago, I've received several phone books - a bunch usually get dumped in the apartment lobby near the mailboxes, then are distributed to residents' doorsteps. I keep the most current one, should a power outage prevent use of the internet for looking up phone numbers, etc. It's the same rationale for keeping a land line instead of relying on a cell phone: you just never know.

Take them to your local recycling center, you can get some $$ for your nest coffee

Recycle it! I barely have enough space for the current phone book!

I keep one... just in case like everyone else. The power does go out from time to time here. Before you throw it away, ahem, recycle it, thumb through the coupon section. There are often some good coupons in there for things like pizza delivery, oil changes, dry cleaning, etc. I didn't discover this until a year ago and was pleasantly surprised.

@Grid, if you want to stop having them delivered, here's information on how to do that.

tear out the fantastic Rainbow 20% coupon (one for this month!) and then recycle last year's.

I keep ours. Our house is 90 years old and always in need of some repair. I can never find contractors online. The phone book and our free neighborhood paper's ads are lifesavers.

The cost of dialing Information from my cell phone during the times I can't look up the number on the internet is worth not having the clutter of a phone book. My phone book goes straight from the doorstep to the recycle bin and I save about a cubic foot of space in my house.

I like having a yellow pages in the trunk of my car - good for looking stuff up when I'm out and about, and it has a city map in it that I can use in a pinch.

the problem with the "I can look anything up on the internet" ideology can be summed up in one phrase:

power outages.

OK, so keep your emergency numbers (including the Chinese takeout) on a sheet of paper. I've kept (some of) the yellow pages for years and keep not using them, so into the bin they go.

I'm glad to see this addressed. A few times a year at our apartment we get phone books stacked up below the mailboxes... the sheer number of them is frightening, and no one picks them up. Hmm... maybe I could build a fortress for the benefit of the complex's children.

The irony is that it's so hard to get a decent directory instead of all the bloody ads.

A huge pile are delivered to our building every year...
...and I never bother to pick one up, so I assume the remainders are recycled.

What the folks at: http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/ are doing is great. Registering with them won't get you off print book distribution lists...right now.

What will get you off is to call each Yellow Pages print publisher and ask them to take you off their list. I wrote a little post about it here:

http://yousnoozeyoulose.com/2008/08/11/yellow-pages-love-em-or-hate-em/

If you want to recycle, be careful where you do it. Not all cities and towns want phone books co-mingled with other paper recycled materials.

I'm also compiling information to forward to the Yellow Pages publishers: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/51471/yellow-pages-survey - if you can provide your anonymous input that would be great!

Twice I've been home when the book was delivered and I politely handed it back to the delivery person and tried to explain that I didn't want to waste it.

If the internet is down, I use a free 411 info number on my cell, no more $1.25 charges on my cell bill. 800-373-3411

If there is no internet AND cell service, I got bigger problems to deal with.

I am working on a junk mail project and would like to talk to anyone in the Southern Calif area who is passionate about junk mail and is doing something active against it. You can email me at jerold49@gmail.com