Opt-Out of Yellow Pages Delivery – It’s Easy, Almost

I arrived home one afternoon this week to find my free copy of the 660 page San Mateo County Central “Buy Local” Phone Book for 2011-2012 waiting on my front porch. As you might guess, I was not one of a “chosen few” to receive a hand-delivered hardcopy of the updated telephone directory. It seems we all still get them, and a quick check of neighboring doorsteps revealed that enough copies of the new Yellow Pages were floating around our condo complex to build a fort with (granted, it would be a pathetic flimsy fort with pale yellow walls, but you get the idea).

The folks at Yellow Pages still insist on printing and distributing gazillions of paper copies of the phone book, whether you want them or not. And why wouldn’t they? In this age of digital technology, where else could you readily find such useful information? Well, there’s Google and Yelp, and the millions of websites they link to, and of course, there’s the Yellow Pages own website (myYP.com) which contains essentially all the same data as the printed phone book. But who wants to bother with fishing a smart phone out of their pocket and clicking a button to access a world of information, when you can just walk to the kitchen (if you're home), and rearrange your cupboards until you eventually dig the Yellow Pages out from underneath a bag of kitty litter in the bottom of the pantry?

 It’s possible that I am being unnecessarily smarmy about all the paper and energy that are wasted in the production and distribution of the Yellow Pages. It’s not that I am mortally offended by the existence of telephone books, and I am not even saying they are completely unnecessary. I’m sure there are those who can’t get (or don’t want) access to the internet who probably still use the phone book. And even for the rest of us, it’s occasionally helpful, once every three years or so, to be able to get your hands on a phone book when you can’t find a decent cell phone signal or wireless connection. I don’t begrudge anyone their right to make telephone books for just such instances. I simply resent the (seemingly bi-weekly) automatic home delivery of telephone books that I’ll never use. It’s annoying, and more importantly, it’s wasteful.

I’m not known for my overzealous commitment to recycling (I DO participate in our community’s recycling program, but I have to admit that I’m not giving a restaurant quality dishwashing to that empty plastic ketchup container so that it can be recycled), but even I can’t stand to let half a dozen 600 page books pile up uselessly in my cupboards.