In an effort to “Go Green,” many people are seeking to discontinue the delivery of their Yellow Pages and similar telephone directories. Experts attribute this movement to an emerging generation that prefers to use online and mobile resources when searching for businesses. And why not? Online research is faster, friendlier and provides more information in a fraction of the time!
“Yellow Page usage among people say, below (age) 50, will drop to zero or near zero over the next five years,” Bill Gates said at a summit in May of last year. "... people use the Internet approximately fifteen to one (15:1) over the phone book and other sources of consumer research. That's an increase from an estimated 7:1 just a few years ago" according to Tom Elliott in his book "Website 411: Business Survival in an Internet Economy". Businesses will have to adapt to these new online methods as the phone book becomes obsolete.
This method is “faster and more efficient and helps preserve the planet’s resources,” according to Geoff Wilson at Pseudofish.com. And how much of the planet’s resources could be saved in this effort? Environmentalist Larry West writes that, according to Green Valley Recycling in Los Gatos, Calif., and Modesto’s Parks and Recreation Department, if every American recycled their phone books for a year:
- We would save up to 650,000 tons of paper
- Free up to 2 million cubic yards of landfill space
- 7,000 gallons of water
- 17-31 trees
- 4,100 kilowatts of electricity—enough to power an average home for six months.
2 comments:
Your comments contain a number of incorrect facts.
While the popular myth is that the industry is responsible for the neutering of forests, the reality is the Yellow Pages industry doesn’t knock down any trees for its paper!!! Let me repeat that – they don’t need to cut any trees for their paper supply. Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers, old yellow pages, and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills. Not only that, as wood chips decompose, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas closely associated with global warming. Paper manufacturing thus puts these chips to good use. Many paper providers will also use 5% or less of recycled directories in their paper creation.
Your stats on usage are also not correct. Those books got referenced nearly 15 billion times last year. 90% of all adults reference them at least once a year, 75% in a typical month, and 50+% on average month. How about on average 1.4X each week.
The Internet is wonderful thing, but myth that it all we need doesn't hold water. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the broadband market is about tapped out. There will always be a good percentage of the population that will never have access to the industry’s Internet products. Barely more than 50% of households in the U.S. (about 56 million homes), currently subscribe to a high-speed Internet service. An additional 21 million households still use dial-up connections (yes, you read that right – dial-up connections).
First, thank you for your opinions. I always welcome the submission of opposing viewpoints. As Voltaire once said, “I may disagree with your opinion, but will defend to the death your right to express it.”
I wish I could agree with all of the sentiments you mention or apologize for any misstated facts, but my post was based on a combination of government and commercial resources which included both economic and ecological details. Although I am not certain where your information is sourced (with the exception of your reference to an unspecified issue of the Wall Street Journal), I am sure that you are 100% confident in your reply, and I completely respect your emphatic beliefs.
While I also would like to believe that use of a phone book could individually be tallied with accuracy to account for the round number of approximately 15,000,000,000 phone book uses last year, the data from which my post was compiled is traceable back to various source files. That’s not to say that I disagree that 15 billion is not an impressive number, but without a relative reference (i.e. some ballpark guess about how many times phone books were fingered through the previous year, two years, etc.) there is nothing relevant about nine zeros before the decimal. In the bigger picture of reporting factual evidence from controlled studies, surveys, etc, it is necessary to consider the trends, not the snapshot in time, when making predictions for future years. The trends, backed by data, simply show an indisputable increase in search engine references compared to a decrease in phone book references.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I use the phone book myself on occasion. I’m not condemning it. It works to serve a purpose, and it has served its purpose well over the years. I don’t advocate that everyone should discard their phone books. And I have nothing personal against wood chips either, to be honest. My article was not intended to create a prohibition against wood and wood products. I am very curious as to whether you work for a phone book company, a paper mill, or a lumber yard, because my data seemed to illicit quite the vehement reply. I won’t ask because it’s frankly none of my business, but I could see where there may be some sensitivity to the topic if job security were involved or you were a stakeholder in the process. My intention was not to ripple the water, there, either.
I suppose that if the numbers that I reported came from a single source, it would lend question to their validity. Realizing that, I was specific in corroborating the information between multiple, credible sources from known experts. Like most statistics, there are always different ways to looking at the numbers and there may be more to the story than either of us are aware. I don’t claim to be an ecologist or an economist. I simply found the details interesting enough to evaluate further and report my findings. I’m sure that the figures that you present have a foundation based in some kind of report, and for credibility reasons, hopefully not one produced by a company that they defend. (I certainly don’t hold you personally accountable for the accuracy or inaccuracy of any errant numbers that you propose.) The bad part about the use of statistics generated from a company within an industry that supports them is that such non-scientific behavior gave rise to the expression “figures lie and liars figure”, which is precisely why I was careful to use non-single source data. I just get a little worried when I see nice round numbers consistently cited without references: 60%, 40%, and other nice, clean, statistically improbably perfect fits. And I would agree that 21 million people MAY still be on dial up (I haven’t finished counting all of them myself… there may be 21.2 million for all I know), but does your reporting take into account that there are laws in place mandating that commercial enterprise equips dial-up-only areas with high speed access availability within the next two to five years (depending on locale)? As I mentioned above, a number without a relative reference is meaningless. What do you suppose the dial-up trend will be as high-speed becomes universally available in the coming years? A follow up question to that, what impact will that trend have on consumer reliance on “flat” methods of traditional advertisement (like the phone book) as compared to reference to online methods (both phone records and keyword searches)? To be credible, the numbers must address the bigger picture.
In closing, I found your post to be reflective and thought provoking, though it references static data from undisclosed sources. It has me asking additional questions. I think we will both learn many enlightening new details as more research is done and more trend data becomes available. So far my findings are that the tendency of people to be drawn to the Internet continues to increase not only because of “thinking green,” but out of convenience and speed as well. Perhaps that explains why even the phone book companies are yielding to the trend and establishing online counterparts to the alternatives of bulky books. The phone book companies seem to understand that the money is shifting in that direction. They are adapting, and as consumers increasingly turn to keyword searches rather than second guessing topic headers on paper, there’s momentum building to support the concern that printing days are numbered for phone book companies. Paradigm shifts in technology have that effect on every industry at one point or another… Just ask Smith Corona how they feel about the popularity of word processing software today. (Uh, strike that. Smith Corona didn’t adapt, and therefore went out of business.)
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