It's Not Easy Being Green

One of the complaints you sometimes hear about newspapers has nothing to do with what they say (or don't say) or how well they reach their audiences; it has to do with the paper they're printed on. Clear-cutting forests' worth of trees to crush them up and smear ink on them is less and less politically correct in these increasingly "green" times we live in. Many people who've canceled their newspaper subscriptions complain about papers piling up in a corner, having to be recycled, and have chosen to end their participation in this environmental waste.

There's another industry going through many of the same technological changes as the newspaper business, and it's starting to face a real backlash about wasting dead trees: the Yellow Pages directory business. With thick Yellow Pages (and White Pages) books more and more irrelevant in many households and businesses (sound like anything we know?), there's a growing movement to ban or at least restrict the distribution of phone books. And the directory business is starting to respond, at least paying more lip service to the green movement. One of the leading organizations opposed to Yellow Pages distribution, YellowPagesGoesGreen, says, "Municipalities and local government that provide trash services are extremely concerned about the landfill cost and why they have to absorb the cost of handling the telephone directories."

It's not hard to imagine the same sort of rhetoric directed toward the piles of newspapers that readers put into their recycling bins (at best) every week. Newspaper companies need to be watching this closely. The environmental impact of newspaper printing and distribution has been a ticking time bomb for years, and the rapid growth of interest in all things green could start putting more pressure on the industry in short order. That could lead to more use of recycled papers, smaller papers, or even pressure to switch more quickly and aggressively to online distribution.

Newspapers have been lucky to dodge this bullet so far—largely because their newsrooms, in their aggressive coverage of and editorializing on the environmental movement and the need for things like more fuel-efficient cars and cleaner industrial emissions, have conveniently chosen not to look too closely at their own industry's environmental impact. But the activists are now coming for the phone book business; can increased scrutiny and criticism of newspapers' crushed-dead-tree practices be far behind?

Comments

[KenC]

Your post has some inaccuracies in it:

Yellow Pages only takes up some .3% of all landfill space, so they are not the culprit of why landfills are maxing out

2nd, while the popular myth is that this industry is responsible for the neutering of forests, the reality is the Yellow Pages industry doesn’t knock down any trees for its paper!!! Let me repeat that – they don’t need to cut any trees for their paper supply. Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills. Not only that, as wood chips decompose, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas closely associated with global warming. Paper manufacturing thus puts these chips to good use. Many paper providers will also use 5% or less of recycled directories in their paper creation.

3rd, my tax dollars are being used for curbside recycling of newspapers, magazines, etc, but now municipalities don't want them in the same recycle stream???? The industry would glad take back old, unused directories. Here's why -- read my post on how YP paper is made: http://www.yptalk.com/archive.cfm?ID=322&CatID=3

[Mark Potts]

Thanks for your comment. I'm not sure what inaccuracies you're referring to--I was simply taking commentary elsewhere about the Yellow Pages and using that as a jumping off point to talk about newspapers' possible environmental issues. Any beefs with the facts about Yellow Pages and the environment are best addressed to the other sources I linked to. I was merely reporting what they said.

[Jason Preston]

"The environmental impact of newspaper printing and distribution has been a ticking time bomb for years,"

too true. While I think the "green" movement is on the whole a force for good, it can often broadside industries that rely on something "un-environmental" like printing for their livelihood.

I think that a lot of people, myself included, still have some affinity for getting content on paper as opposed to ONLY online (and let's not forget that electricity has its environmental impacts, too, especially in the US), and that will continue for some time.

Papers can and are spending time and money researching alternatives to classic paper (digital paper), which I think is a smart move. Here's hoping they develop a viable product in time.