Who says that print Yellow Pages aren’t environmentally friendly???

While the popular myth is that this industry is responsible for the neutering of forests, the reality is the Yellow Pages industry doesn’t knock down any trees for its paper!!! Let me repeat that – they don’t need to cut any trees for their paper supply. Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills. Not only that, as wood chips decompose, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas closely associated with global warming. Paper manufacturing thus puts these chips to good use. Many paper providers will also use 5% or less of recycled directories in their paper creation.

Interesting comments about on-line searches and the follow up on killing trees. Even if the industry uses recycled paper 90% still end up in a landfill. So the industry is once removed from the tree! How about not getting the book if you do not want one? I have noticed that it is very difficult to stop getting a book, if not impossible. I did find two sites on the web that say they can help. YellowPagesGoesGreen.org will contact the publsihers and tell them to stop delivering the book. It appears they are working with state and local governments to enact laws to stop the unsolicited delivery iof books. I also saw a PaperLess Petition site that is trying to gain signatures to do the same thing. Looks like this is now a hot topic in the new “green world”.