Stop Yellow Waste

Our friends at Holstee, the brilliant upcycled clothing company (all their garments are made from a combination of post waste like plastic bottles, and other recycled materials, and post-industrial waste like polyester scraps from factories - plus, I might add, they lend 10% of all sales as microloans to entrepreneurs in developing natiion via Kiva) have just launched an anti-waste campaign of their own: Stop Yellow Waste.

In their own words: "We are sick and tied of seeing phone books printed, packaged and shipped - only to be put on our curb then in the landfill."

So they started taking photo's of all the freshly discarded phone books they were coming across and published them to a public posterous account.  They've made it so anyone can email pics@stopyellowwaste with photos of freshly discarded phonebooks + they will be published in real time.  Here's the blog post they just wrote about it. Photos are also be auto posted to twitter @yellowwaste and facebook.

it's a great idea - this annual drop off of phonebooks nationwide (a staggering 540 million books each year) is highly symbolic of the incredible and unecessary waste that goes on all around us every day. It's lazy and unimaginative and uncaring and inefficient.

It's not that some people don't want or need physical phone books, it's that there are clearly much, much less of them than the number of books printed and distributed. plus, getting them from a street drop-off doesn't seem to be a useful way of matching supply with demand, or even of conveniently accessing the product itself.

If there were zero constraints on time or resources - in other words zero economic cost - or zero environmental impact (in terms of global climate change or even local pollution) then it wouldn't be a problem. But I don't think nano-bio-degradable phone books that disappear into thin air if they aren't picked up within 48 hours delivered in zero emission vehicles by people without jobs who are being usefully re-employed, for example, is coming anytime soon ;-)

So since that's not how it works, one wonders why don't the undeniable smart people in telephone companies like, in the US, Verizon, AT&T et al, ever sit down and wonder if there's a better way of doing this? Given the environmental + economic impact + common sense resistence to seeing a whole load of effort and resource clearly go to waste + pollution of the streets we all live on, you'd think they would.

But they don't so kudos to Holstee boys Michael and Dave for getting fed up of witnessing this incredible waste and doing something about it.

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