Saturday, March 28, 2009

It's Phone Book Season

The melting snow has ushered in a new round of phone book deliveries. This time it was three phone books all wrapped up in two shocking orange plastic bags. Paper waste wrapped in plastic waste. Ugh!!

My theory is that magical, computer illiterate beings blanket the entire town with plastic bagged phone books while us innocent villagers sleep at night. No matter how hard I try to find the magically culprits, they are as elusive as Santa Clause on Christmas Day.

The wonderful town I live in allows phone book companies to distribute as many phone books as they wish, yet they do not accept those same phone books for curbside recycling. And opting out didn't seem to work either.
The solution? Hide a tiny blue barrel behind a nondescript phone company building on the other side of town and label it "phone book recycling". Yeah, that's going to keep all of those phone books out of the waste stream...
Today I did notice that a new phone book collection bin was added to my side of town. Ugly as all get out, but it's there never the less.


Peeking through the slot, I noticed that my phone books were the only books in the bin. No friends for my lonely phone books.

These bins are bandaids at best. I've opted out of phone books and chased down mysterious phone book vomiting vans. What can I do to stop the hundreds of repetitive (useless in my house) phone books from being delivered to my neighborhood every year? Why don't I have the right to decide what is delivered in my driveway?

1 comment:

Ruth Dynamite said...

Phone books don't taste so bad when you saute them with a little white wine, garlic and fresh herbs.