Recently, a few gents who work with Tobyjoe launched a site called Paperless Petition. Basically, it’s a way of opting out of receiving the phonebook and therefore saving the environment one less wasteful product at a time. They launched it just in time for Earth Day.
There’s the catch, however. Won’t they run them anyway? Recently, the newspaper equivalent of the Nielsens Ratings took place. Basically, the numbers attained through that rating, which is called the Audit Bureau of Circulations, is what each newspaper uses when selling advertising space. Well, one of the free New York newspapers was found dumping thousands and thousands of newspapers into recycling centers. (Read more about that here.) At least they were dumping them into recycling centers, right? Thing is, I feel like that no matter how many people sign this awesome paperless petition, the Yellow Pages will continue to print excessive quantities just for to dangle the numbers in front of their advertisers. But I have high hopes for this; I think it’s a great idea.
Hopefully, this becomes so big that the advertisers get wind of it so they have no choice but to cut down. Plesae sign it, if you’d like. Help me get it out there, if you can.
i spent Sept through Feb delivering the Richmond Times-Dispatch every morning at 4am and let me tell you… I had extra newspapers coming out my ears. And that’s a newspaper people pay for. I would have a trunk-full of sunday papers from three weeks ago after a while, but I would feel so bad about the idea of just throwing them out that I would force myself to wait for recycling day. (i’m sure the recycling guys loved me) But the wastefulness in general broke my heart.
I can only imagine, Aimee. It’s really discouraging living here. You see them pile up everywhere. Plus, they start subway fires constantly. They hand them out free, so we have a buttload that just end up tossed on the tracks. Plus, they float through the streets like leaves.
It’s really sad. Get your news online! Get your numbers online, too!
What’s amazing is that the Yellow Pages industry distributed 540 million printed directories this year (more than one per person), justifying it by claiming they can no longer only send these hefty books out to landline users since most people have gone mobile…it’s such a waste of paper. It would make more sense to distribute on demand, but I’m sure that wouldn’t make the Yellow Pages numbers look too great. They seem to be holding on to a lost and expensive (financially and environmentally) cause.