Why The Hell Do I Keep Getting Phonebooks Every Year? (How To Opt-Out For Good)

• Thomas Nelson
• October 22, 2021
• Sustainable Living
• 0 Comments

Two weeks ago, a pile of phonebooks, stored in single-use plastic bags, were dumped at my rural community mailbox. I wasn’t pleased to see it. It’s well known that most Americans won’t even use a phonebook a single time over the span of a year, and I got to see that play out in the form of an untouched pile of phone books that slowly got ruined by the weather then discarded by some unknown person.

The pile sat there for about two weeks. Every time I walked by it, I felt a little more annoyed. It was only a matter of time before the sky opened up and rain began to fall – a typical experience in October when you live in Oregon. Those phonebooks would be ruined. And of course, what I predicted did occur. After our first heavy rainfall, the phone books were all sopping wet and pretty much unusable.

If you strolled down the main, paved road that cuts through the dirt roads of my community, you’d see the same thing play out at every block’s community mailbox. A pile of phone books, all ruined by the rain.

I’m sure there was a time that that pile of phonebooks would have been grabbed by all the residents in the area. Before the internet came along, it was the best way to contact a business or someone else in town. But now, we can use search engines to find contact information. Most people don’t use phonebooks anymore.

Seeing that pile of sopping wet phonebooks made me wonder: what the hell? It’s not like we manufacture Model T cars – we developed better vehicle technology. So why are we still producing these archaic phonebooks?

It’s all about that ad revenue

Like with junk mail, the main reason that pile of soggy-ass phonebooks sat at my mailbox for weeks is because some companies out there actually make a tidy little profit from the ad revenue. The phonebook is full of ads, and the ad spend is calculated on the number of phonebooks delivered, not how many people actually use the phonebook.

Wild.

To be fair, some people do still use phonebooks, and it may not be the worst idea to have one around in the off chance you find yourself without the ability to get online. But do we need a new one every year? Does everyone need to have one?

I don’t exactly have answers for those questions, but what I do know is that I got to watch a few dozen phonebooks get ruined and thrown in the garbage. That doesn’t sit well with me. What’s the impact of all that waste, anyway?

Phonebooks make climate change worse

In our civilization, bent on infinite growth on a finite planet, there are few things that we do that don’t make climate change worse. But there’s something uniquely asinine about the carbon footprint of phonebooks, of all things.

The carbon footprint of the wasteful production of phonebooks is more than 3.5 million tons a year. The process also consumes billions of gallons of water and, in the end, 650,000 tons of phonebooks wind up being recycled or thrown in the garbage every year.

Look, I get it. It’s 2023. Literally everything we humans do sucks. But after I watched all those poor, unwanted phonebooks get rained on, I decided I wanted to suck a little bit less. So I decided to opt-out of receiving future phonebooks.

How the hell do I opt-out of the phonebook?

The opt out process for phonebooks is so simple. The National Yellow Pages Consumer Choice & Opt-Out Site is pretty much your go-to for the process. All you have to do is create a free account (I used a burner email account for this so I don’t get a bunch of spam in my regular email) then log in. Because it requires you to input your delivery address for your account, it’ll immediately take you to all the phonebooks delivered to your area. You can then choose to opt-out of each one.

Hit “save changes” before leaving the page, then confirm on the next page, and that’s it, you’re done.

Requiem for a soggy phonebook

What I truly regret about this whole thing is that I didn’t think to try and opt-out sooner. All of the phonebooks I’ve received and recycled over the years – what a waste. I suppose Maya Angelou was right when she said you should do your best until you know better, then when you know better, do better.

To the heaps of ruined phonebooks, I truly mourn you. I hope you’re in a better place. Although truthfully, I know you aren’t. Wet paper can’t be recycled. You were taken to the landfill.