Student Letters

May 11th, 2011

Dear Board of Selectmen:

Phone books are a wasteful environmental problem. Also, many people don’t even want or need them. Brookline residents should be able to opt-in for phone books, otherwise they don’t get them.

Here are some facts from our class’s survey of 118 people who live in Brookline. 97% of people “never” or “rarely” use phone books. 78% of people don’t even keep their phone books!

Phone books also use trees, oil, and water to make. 540 million phone books are made a year in the US. That’s over 378 billion pages! If someone stacked all the phone books made in the US each year, it would be 12,784 miles tall! 7.2 million barrels of oil are used in making them. 19 million trees are cut down each year to make phone books which is equal to 700 Central Parks!

We do NOT want to ban all phone books, but instead let people have a choice to get them or not. Many people just use the internet to find phone numbers. That’s why an opt-in list would be a good solution, or have a pile of phone books for people who want them at public buildings such as a super market, library, or post office.

We hope you see why phone books are a growing environmental problem.

Sincerely,

Lilia
4th Grade Student
The Park School