“They certainly have disappeared from consumers’ usage, from their habits and I think just from general collective market awareness.” “For all practical purposes, they have disappeared already,” he said. Instead, they found creative uses for the books, including child booster seats or door stops. “Quite often, when they were distributed, they would just go straight into the recycling bin,” said Alex Algard, CEO and founder of Whitepages.Īlgard said the distribution of phone books is tied to “legacy regulation,” but its own survey found that most people didn’t want them. Whitepages, which operates the website, has pushed for opt-in laws and a few years ago started a Ban the Phone Book campaign.
There’s been a national movement as well. However, the state’s recycling rate for directories was just 11 percent. In 2006, an estimated 13,000 tons of phone books were distributed, almost 13 pounds per household, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. “You have more and more people who are finding the electronic version more valuable.”Įnvironmental groups have pushed for the opt-in laws because of the large amount of waste the phone books create. “The books are becoming less and less valuable as people cut the cord, because there are only landline telephone numbers in those books,” said Brent Christensen, president and CEO of the Minnesota Telecom Alliance. Still, as more people get rid of their landline telephones and turn to mobile phones alone, the eventual demise of the white pages seems likely. Some phone companies say they will continue to distribute them because their customers want them as a community resource. Minnesota joins at least 18 other states with so-called “opt in” rules, meaning the traditional directories only need to be distributed if a customer requests one.ĭon’t expect the phone books to disappear quite yet, especially in small towns and rural areas. It allows local service providers to offer telephone directories online only and stop delivering white pages directories to all their residential customers. In Minnesota, the white pages took another step toward oblivion last month when a state rule change took effect. With the prevalence of smartphones and the Internet, using the white pages to look up someone’s phone number may seem obsolete, especially to digital-savvy generations. For some people, the phone books that automatically show up on the doorstep or in the mailbox are relics of the past.
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