thank you for the information!

ugh! why so many phonebooks? whyyyyy????

i love this blog for all the info i can't find anywhere else. thanks for posting.

So I didn't need to throw them in the neighbor's yard... under a bush so he wouldn't see them?

You know, if I dumped my trash on someone else's porch, I'd be fined. Why does Verizon get away with it?

Thank you! Thank you! And good riddance!

Thank you for the advice I had no idea you could opt out. I can't even remember the last time I have ever looked in a phone book for anything.

I call the number on everything I get - my junk mail has dropped dramatically. It's wonderful!!

If you call the number for yellow book they will route you to this number: 888-400-5914. You may want to call that number directly.

...I thought it was really strange that this house that's been demolished for over a year on 59th and 32nd (they were going to start building last fall) had a phone book bag hanging from it's chainlink fence around it's overgrown grass and weeds yard. I guess the guys who drop off these phone books get paid by how many they drop off? Anyway I just thought it was strange and had to share.

Seriously, who uses phone books anymore?

I was lucky, I bumped into the guy when he was dropping off the phone books and told him I didn't want it. I guess I won't be so lucky next time he comes around so I'll for sure call all of the opt-out numbers provided. Thanks!

I think that the phone books are produced because they have a nice profit margin for the publishers. Businesses purchase the ads fearing that it they don't then others who do will get their business. The data and printing are much lower than their income stream. It has nothing to do with whether we actually use the books.
I'm very glad to have the phone numbers so that I can cancel their deliveries too.

I think we should all take our phone books and stack them around the front door of one of the Seattle DEX or Verizon businesses. Imagine the whole city driving by them, chucking the phone books out onto their sidewalk.

I can't think of the last time I used a phonebook. Wasn't this century.

Some little kid delivered phone books to my office the other day. He was like 7. It was strange. And annoying... phone books = waste, waste and more waste.

I like to ripp them in half using my big muscles, the ones I got from O.A.C..NOT la fitness

I'm torn. I could cancel delivery, but then I wouldn't be able to burn it in my fireplace and get a free night's heat. I just thought the phone company cared about keeping me warm.

hey candice, the same thing happened at our office on Ballard Ave yesterday. It was a little kid. It made me wonder about child labor laws...

I guess it's not that much different than a paper route, but the phone companies are not the newspaper.

The same little kid delivered books to our office too. Why wasn't he in school? Those books are heavy. It was cute because he asked for business cards-he was collecting them.

Yeah, he took one of our business cards, too. Why wasn't he in school? I didn't even think of that until now.

Thank you!! I was just thinking I needed to research this information.

Where are the local offices of the phone book companies located? I need to make a delivery of my own.

I have two phone books sitting right here on my desk when all I really need is the thing right in front of me... the Internet!

WhitePages.com is great for looking people up... and it's a local Seattle company.

http://www.WhitePages.com

Great info!!! I literally picked them up off the front porch and dropped them in the recycle bin before even going inside. Canceling all 3 took less less than 5 minutes!

BlackSheep, thanks for the tip, I'm going to call on all junk mail from here on out.

Regarding the alternate number for Yellow Book given by MR in #9, that number didn't work for me but the original one in the post did. Never doubt a geeky swede...

I saw a van drive up on 52nd the other day and a few kids got out, running up and down the street delivering books. Probably a guy and his kids doing a little work. As for child labor laws, c'mon, we're not talking kids working in a steel mill, they're just delivering books. Better than having them hanging around spray painting every vertical surface.

Was funny though, every door on my apartment building had a book, including the laundry room door...

Y'all who called the numbers will have to let us know if you get a book the next time. There's no way in hell the guy in the van with the delivery kids is gonna check a list to make sure whether or not to deliver to you. If a laundry room gets a book... EVERYONE does.

Candice, when I was calling the number on the last set, I was thinking I had called them before, but there are so many different companies sending phone books that I'm not sure, and I don't keep any sort of list of who I have called. I'd bet you are right, though - if the laundry room gets them, they probably aren't going from a list.

Although, it's handy that if you are sitting and waiting for the dryer to finish, you can catch up on those phone calls...

But I got rid of Valpak, and all the weekly grocery ads, and that advertising thing the Times sends, and Geico, etc, etc...

In my book (so to speak), the answer to this problem is what Jeff suggested: getting the distributors prosecuted. If the state laws against criminal trespass etc. aren't adequate, then we could lobby our legislators to outlaw this practice (Reuven Carlyle asked for our ideas). We could also lobby the city to add this practice to the grocery-bag nuisance as a topic of environmental legislation. Barring that, we might file a class-action suit for damages against the perpetrators.

So:

Step 1: Do legal research to determine whether there is a basis in current law for demanding prosecutions.

Step 2: Follow the results of Step 1 by demanding prosecutions or lobbying for additional legislation.

Step 3: Research the possibility of class-action tort claims.

The goal would be to assure that only those who request delivery of materials get them, unless they're delivered by the USPS, in which case there's a whole other realm of law to deal with.

Any takers?

I too just chuck these relics straight into the recycle bin. A thousand thank-yous for providing this info!

Phonebooks are soooo obsolete. It's like having someone delivering multiple typwriters to your door step...

...with a rotary phone?

Okay, I'll take the bait: I like the yellow pages, and the white pages, for that matter. Yeah, you can look up numbers on your computer but who in Gawd's name has their computer with them all the time? Certainly not me. I keep a yellow pages in the back seat of my car so that I don't have to spend the extra charges calling information on my cell phone.

Oh, but that's not environmentally correct. It is however, much more convenient for me.

Dex I like, Verizon is useless.

We should be able to request phone books if we want them, and refuse them if we don't. Pretty simple.

But go ahead and file your lawsuits. Because that's something we need more of in this world -- lawsuits!!!

This link was posted in a similar thread on the Queen Anne blog. I thought it was worth copying over here: http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/