San Francisco moves to ban yellow pages delivery
Every year, San Francisco’s 800,000 residents receive on their doorstep more than 1.5 million Yellow Pages phone books. They did not ask for them. Most people who have high-speed Internet access (i.e. the overwhelming majority) do not want them.
Yet, in San Francisco alone, this monumental amount of flimsy, cheap paper, if stacked, would reach almost 8.5-times the height of Mt. Everest, creating 7 million pounds of waste a year.
San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu unveiled a solution to all of this waste at a press conference today. It is the first of its kind in the nation.
It’s simple. Don’t force people to go through the hoops of actively “opting-out.” Rather, make sure phone companies distribute hard copy business directories only to the people who want them. The city’s measure would establish a 3-year pilot program, during which Yellow Pages distributors would be barred from leaving books on the stoop of an unanswered door or face a $500 fine. A person would have to be at home to actively accept the delivery, or instead would have to explicitly request that they desire one to be left there.
In essence, it’s the first-ever ban on the Yellow Pages you didn’t ask for. After all, with Yelp, Google, and Yahoo a mere click away, you’d be hard pressed to find many people who want those ink-heavy tomes.
This doesn’t sound like too controversial a concept. Most phone books end up unopened and hopefully in the recycling bin—but recycling a phone book still has three-times the carbon footprint as not printing one in the first place. This wastes precious city budget dollars. According to the Product Stewardship Institute, local governments spend approximately $54 million per year to process the waste of phone books that become obsolete with each new printing. San Francisco estimates it spends $1 million.
Regardless of this general “win-win” situation, any effort to mess with the Yellow Pages factory is extremely controversial. For example, in October, the city of Seattle passed an ordinance including the first-ever citywide “opt-out” clearinghouse. The Yellow Pages Association has promptly filed a lawsuit claiming that this measure violates distributors First Amendment rights.
Why are Yellow Page companies fighting so hard to make sure they can print their phone books, when at the same time, phone companies are generally supportive of local measures to eliminate White Pages printing? (For example, BanthePhoneBook.org, a coalition to advocate for White Pages bans, is actually sponsored by WhitePages, Inc.)
About 2 months ago, I talked with Teresa Bui, a policy associate with the Campaign for Recycling, which is tracking phone book reduction efforts. She told me the answer is simple: the bottom line. The business advertising in the Yellow Pages is worth a lot of money; by contrast, it usually costs phone companies money to print residential listings in the White Pages, which they are in many cases required to do.
But from the green-minded consumers’ and taxpayers’ perspective, most hard-copy phone books—whether Yellow Pages or White Pages—are simply a huge waste. What’s even more perverse is that while the need for printed phone books has plummeted in recent years, the number printed has increased as multiple companies compete for business in the same geographic area.
The Yellow Pages Association is sure to do everything is can to beat back this ordinance, as it did in Seattle. The San Francisco Chronicle already reports its displeasure.
Meanwhile, I’d like to see an expansion of this ordinance from San Francisco to cities across the nation. Tell the San Francisco Board of Supervisor you support the passage of this landmark ordinance. It would be great to show a flood of national support to demonstrate the need for an end to wasteful Yellow Page deliveries everywhere.
by Jess Leber
https://news.change.org/stories/san-francisco-debuts-landmark-ban-on-unwanted-phone-book-deliveries
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