Rotten Numbers

The numbers below are rotten!! They’re proof of the massive waste and environmental damage caused by phone books that most of us don’t want. Do 300 million Americans really need 540 million phone books? Did they really make 1.8 phone books for my 2-year-old son? And 1.8 phone books for me when I don’t want one? Can you visualize the 12,784 MILE tall stack of phone books that are made each year in the US piled up into outer space?

According to YellowPagesGoesGreen.org:

•540 million yellow phone books are made a year in the US (1.8 per American)
•7.2 million barrels of oil are used
•19 million trees are destroyed

My class did some math and found:

•19 million trees = 700 Central Parks
•540 million books x 700 pages each = 378 billion pages made in the US each year
•540 million books times 1.5 inches thick each = 12,784 miles of yellow pages phone books made each year in our country (if you could stack them)
•Divide that pile by 365 and you get a 35-mile tall pile of yellow phone books is made per day

For Brookline, MA we figured out:

•Brookline phone books use up 1,900 trees each year
•We have 26,400 residences and 1,000 businesses = 27,400 locations getting 2 phone books each = 54,800 phone books
•Multiply that by 700 pages each = 38,360,000 mostly unwanted pages in Brookline
•It’s 2.75 inches of paper in our 2 books per residence/business
•2.75 x 27,400 = 75,350 inches = 6,279 feet of yellow paper per year in Brookline
•That’s 1.19 miles of phone books (if you could stack them) for our one town each year! Yuck!