Wasted paper, frustration, the destruction of our forests.

[deckeda]

How very true.

http://currentconfig.com/2005/02/22/esse...-is-wrong/

[M>B>]

The worst offenders...

[lazydays]

How about those receipts at the grocery store? Buy three items and get a 12" long receipt? Crazy!

[decocritter]

Yellowbook, ATT phone books, etc. Seems we get about 4 different sets of these.

How about the huge sets of the Yellow book that get delivered at least once a year. They put one at the front doors and one at the back doors, even the doors that go to storage rooms, basements, etc.

This year, yesterday they delivered a second set within a week of the first round, even though most of the first sets are still sitting outside, rainsoaked. It is raining again and those are wet. So about 150 set of these books are on our grounds of 53 condos. I would love to catch the idiots that deliver them and ask them if they can't see the first set of litter already here.

No residents want them, so they won't even pick up a set and dispose of them. (which makes someone else have to do more than their share of picking up). They fill up an entire dumpster (which costs us money) and leaves us no place for our weekly garbage.

Call the "recycling number for old books" on the orange litter bag these come in and you get a closed business office or Keep Atlanta Beautiful that claims not to have any agreement with the yellowbook. Call the other number, and the "office is closed". And before you ask, I have filled out forms to opt out, and still get the books.

Why don't they send out a postcard, and you can return it if you want the books? Why should this company be allowed to litter and run? And make finding a way to recycle these monstrosities of wasted paper and plastic bags the public's problem on private property. What is funny is that on the recording of the business office, they actually charge folks that want a book on request or from another area. They should be required to make a second visit to pick up their own books left outside that no one wants

Wonder how much money they waste on paying the delivery people, they could reduce the phone charges for basic service.

I can't believe this goes on with all the talk of recycling, and being green, etc.

[DavidS]

I agree about the Yellow pages phonebooks. At our last house, we got the overall BellSouth (now AT&T) Atlanta business white pages and yellow pages, the yellow pages for our specific area of town, another company's yellow pages for our area of town, plus a smaller copy of the AT&T yellow pages for Atlanta. They usually went right in the recycle bin. I can't remember the last time I opened any actual phone books.

Interesting that they either no longer make or provide the residential listings (although maybe they do for AT&T subscribers). I guess because they may be getting smaller and smaller, with people abandoning POTS for VoIP and cell phone only service.

[Speedy]

Paper isn't the big problem. Easily recyclable and renewable, at least in our country by concerned citizens and from farm raised southern yellow pine.

[Doc]

Phone companies have local monopolies and one trade-off for that is their obligation to print phone directories. (They usually contract with a company like Yellowbook to do it for them.)

They sell ads to cover the expense (and make a little folding money) and they have to disclose circulation numbers to advertisers. The larger the circulation, the more they can charge for an ad.

They do all sorts of stuff to inflate those numbers. Distributing extra copies is a tiny part of it.

I'm sure that with the competition from online phone number and business searches and free (or at least easy) 411 services they're digging for every penny they can scrounge up.

[Mr Downtown]

Phone books are still (mystifyingly) a big business. They're paid for by advertising, and no longer have any connection with the company that provides phone service. So your bill would go up if the phone company was no longer receiving that revenue.

As for forest destruction, if we use less paper, the tree farmers will just plant fewer trees next year. The U.S. has vastly more forest now than a century ago.

[decocritter]

The litter of these books everywhere bothers me more than the recycled paper use. There are blogs with pictures of these books littering across America, rural, cities.

[Doc]

Mr Downtown wrote:
As for forest destruction, if we use less paper, the tree farmers will just plant fewer trees next year. The U.S. has vastly more forest now than a century ago.

Nope. We've basically kept it stable throughout the 20th century. Not more forest. Just not much less.





But the scrub pine and maple that's planted neither replaces the missing hardwoods nor the ecosystem that was destroyed in harvesting that wood.

In fact, it's been postulated that the pines are actually contributing greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and the maples in the Northeast are killing oak saplings.

So, let's hope the "farmers" don't keep mindlessly planting the cheapest trees they can get to replace the forests they're destroying.