Un-recycled Phone Books Pile Up in Minnesota
A state agency in Minnesota is pushing for an opt-in system that would allow customers to choose if they wanted to have a phone book delivered to their home. Currently, only 11 percent of phone books are recycled throughout Minnesota.
According to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, each resident receives an average of 13 pounds of phone books annually, translating to more than 11,000 tons of books diverted to landfills or burners each year.
A problem for recycling centers is the plastic on the phone books. Fox 9 News found several books still wrapped in plastic at the Hennepin County Recycling Center in Bloomington, Minn. Because paper is recycled using water while plastic is melted, these two materials cannot be combined during the recycling process.
Phone book publishers such as Dex and Yellow Pages have recycling databases on their Web sites for customers.
As of June 17th 2011 we have upgraded our comment system to use Facebook comments. The below comments are closed and are listed for historical purposes.
Trey Granger
posted on May 19th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Another issue for phone books is if they have refrigerator magnets inside the packaging. These can also not be recycled with paper.
Beej
posted on May 20th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Crap! I didn’t even think about the magnets. I got my phonebook on Saturday. They left it at the curb, near my mailbox. On Sunday night I dragged the bins out to the curb for pick up on Monday morning. I unwrapped the phone book, threw away the plastic bag and dropped the book straight into the recycling bin without thumbing through it to make sure there wasn’t anything non-paper in it. (My town doesn’t recycle plastic bags. So, please don’t flame me for tossing it.)
Joanne Day
posted on May 21st, 2009 at 9:44 am
Do your grocery stores take plastic bags for recycling? Maybe that would be a great campaign to start in your town.
Valerie Rasp
posted on May 21st, 2009 at 12:27 pm
As part of Keep Carbondale Beautiful (an affiliate of Keep America Beautiful in Southern Illinois), we have a regional phone book recycling drive every winter. Now the region has 3 phone book directories (as if we really need 3). However, the program was cut back some due to the fact volunteers would drive to locations an hour away to pick up phone books. You have to wonder the trade off between the use of a non-renewable resource (i.e. the gas to drive to the far locations) vs. the recycling of the renewable resource (i.e. the paper from the books). In past, we’ve collected almost 30,000 pounds each drive.