Those ubiquitous yellow bags started showing up on my street last week–the ones that carry this year’s batch of new phone books. Of course, with the advent of online directories, such as Switchboard.com and plain old Google, sometimes you really don’t need a phone book anymore–except if you have a small child come to dinner and you don’t have a booster seat and you happen to get a really thick phone book that you can use as a makeshift booster seat. No disrespect to the phone book industry, but I just don’t understand for how much longer people will rely on or even find phone books useful.
In the meantime your home is probably like mine: you have phone books you don’t need anymore and aren’t sure exactly how to dispose of them. That was exactly what faced a cousin of mine in Indianapolis, who was bemoaning getting yet another phone book and her not wanting to throw it in the trash.
So to help my cousin out–and anyone else who would like to dispose of his or her phone books in a responsible way–here at 4 options for getting rid of old phone books.
- Put it in curbside recycling. My cousin laughed out loud when I offered her this option. “Curbside recycling. What’s that? I live in Indianapolis, not the greenest city in the country.” Wow, I had no idea that the option of curbside recycling wasn’t an easy option for the rest of us. I’ll just put my old phone books out with my other recyclables and not give it another thought.
- Find someplace nearby to recycle it. I suggested my cousin log onto Earth 911 to find somewhere nearby where she could recycle her old phone books. This was a fine idea since she has to haul all her recyclables on her own anyway. When I plugged in “phone books” and her zip code into the Earth 911 search engine, I found everything from a local children’s museum to a church that collected phone books for recycling. Note: if you happen to see one of those Paper Retriever Abitibi green-and-yellow recycling dumpsters on a school or church campus, they do not take phone books–which seems crazy to me since the inside of the phone books seems to be the same quality paper as a daily newspaper.
- Tear it into shreds and compost it. Every compost bin needs green matter with its brown, and the torn-out pages from a phone book can be the perfect complement to the organic matter that you put in your compost bin.
- Use the pages as weed blocker. One of my mother’s favorite and frugal ways to keep weeds out of her garden is to put down pieces of newspaper over weeds, and then cover it in mulch. If you don’t have any newspaper available–maybe you don’t get a daily newspaper anymore–you could always tear out the pages of an old phone book and use them instead. (Yeah, those pages aren’t quite as big as a newspaper’s pages but at least you’re reusing the pages in a responsible manner.)
If all else fails, do a Google search using the phrase “how to recycle phone books” and see what comes up. When I did this when I was researching what I was going to write in this blog post, I got 55,000 results. Many of these results were city-specific guides to places locally where you could recycle old phone books–good to know if you live in a place like my cousin, without curbside recycling as your easiest phone book recycling option.
P.S. I also recycle those bags the phone books come in. I use them to clean up after my dog. However, if that isn’t an option for you, you can drop them in a plastic bag recycling bin that you find outside many supermarkets these days.
(Globe Pequot, 2010).
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