Last week I wrote about "Artifacts from the past – Yellow Pages on dead trees". I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed this stupid/ridiculous/outrageous waste of paper…:
Fred Wilson tried to get Verizon to stop sending him the books (but failed…). Craig Newmark may have found the solution for Fred – PaperlessPetition, a non-profit that’s filing a petition to the YPA demanding that Yellow Pages distribution be changed from push (=dumping YP books on everyone’s doorsteps) to pull (=whoever wants a copy has to actively ask for one).
If you too are wondering why on earth anyone would use a 10lb pile of paper to look for a business that can be found in seconds on the web, do some trees a favor by signing the petition here.
BTW, the PaperlessPetition site points out the following amazing bit of data:
The Yellow Pages industry dropped 540 million printed directories this year. That’s more than one per person. With the Internet available literally in our hands, is this acceptable?
Dinosaurs…
