Council Studies Phone Book Opt-Out

Yellow pages may soon go green if Cambridge City Councillor Sam Seidel gets his wish.

The council voted unanimously on Monday to look into an eco-friendly plan that would allow residents to opt out of having phone books delivered to their front doorstep.

“You and all your friends look up most of your phone numbers on the Internet now,” said Seidel, who earned an urban planning degree from the Graduate School of Design in 2001 and won a Council seat last fall.

“The Internet has become the new phone book,” Seidel said. “If that’s true for any individual, then why do we need to produce [books of] 1000, 1500 pages?”

Seidel said that one of his constituents first proposed the idea, which would allow residents to choose not to receive the directories, just as the National Do Not Call Registry allows individuals to avoid telemarketing calls.

Zachary C. Arnold ’10, co-chair of the Harvard College Environmental Action Committee (EAC), said that, while he is unfamiliar with the Cambridge program, “overall it’s a great idea.”

He added that an analog of the initiative could be developed for Harvard.

“There’s huge potential to decrease the stuff we’re printing that doesn’t necessarily need to be printed in such great quantities,” Arnold said.

Arnold cited not just half-inch-thick student telephone directories, but also the ubiquitous CUE Guides and Courses of Instruction as examples of over-printed publications.

Arnold added that the EAC, which has worked at reducing printing before, would “certainly support things like that [program].”

Reference volumes provided by the college, which are printed on a yearly basis, can quickly become obsolete, Arnold added.

“I pick a lot of my courses online, and I believe a lot of students are doing the same thing,” he said.

Seidel, a Berkeley graduate who ran for the council partially on an environmentalist platform, mentioned at Monday’s meeting that the waste of natural resources is not limited to simply the printing process.

“There’s a lot of petrochemicals... that go into distributing these books, and then you have to recycle them,” Seidel said. “There’s a whole lot of fossil fuels that go into this and no benefit to any individual.”

Harvard Resource Efficiency Program coordinator Philip W. Kreycik ’06 agreed with the proposal, saying “I can’t imagine anyone our age using [the Yellow Pages] these days.”