We Can Save a Forest

Can you remember the last time you actually used a paper phone book? Serving as an impromptu booster seat or doorstop doesn't count. If I need to look up a person or business, I'll go to yellow pages.com or some such web site. If I need a contractor for a household job, I'll ask friends for references or call Lou Manfredini at WGN.

If you can't live without your phone book, you may want to stop reading this now. That's how I feel about a real newspaper. I like the feel of it in my hands and can't quite get satisfaction from on-line news. So I sympathize with you.

On the other hand, consider this. In my building alone - 29 floors with 6 units per floor, we are regularly treated to a pile of at least 12 phone books arriving silently in each of our stair landings next to the trash chute. They sit there for weeks, many times without the shrink wrap being removed by even a single resident. Eventually the maintenance men remove them - hopefully, to the recycle bins in the basement and not down the trash chutes.

I'm sure our building is not alone. According to real estate board statistics, there are no fewer than 626,000 housing units in the city of Chicago. I'm no math genius, but if my building alone is not using 348 of these 3 1/2 inch, 2000 page, 5 lb. monsters. Think how many others are sitting idle in highrises and two flats all over the city.

I know they're free, and the folks who publish them get lots of advertising dollars, but sometimes it has to be about more than money. I hope the P.I. attorneys who paid to have their ad affixed to the cover of each book dont mind that their smiling faces are on their way back to be recycled.

I care much less about them and the companies who are selling the ads, than the fact that my great grandchildren may have to go to history books to see what a real forest looks like.