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March 11, 2008
Most Maui residents and businesses have received at least four new telephone books this year for each phone line. For businesses especially, the number of books received can add up fast. These telephone books, which have good information but do tend to duplicate each other, are brought or sent to you whether you want them or not, every year in January and February. There are at least three companies currently having telephone books printed and distributed state-wide. As far as can be determined, they are:
Paradise Yellow Pages – they publish one large book with both white pages and yellow pages; the cover of these books have an enhanced photograph of a hula dancer. 80,000 copies are distributed door-to-door on Maui.
Your EZ to Use Island Pages (last year this same book was published by a company called AdVentures). This is a small blue book, also with both white pages and yellow pages. It has a glossy reproduction of a painting of dolphins by Christian Reese Lassen on the front cover. 80,000 are designated for Maui. These are sent primarily through the U.S. Postal Service, and so will come to you in your mailbox. Many people like these smaller directories, but if you don’t want this book, you can let your mail carrier know not to deliver, or you can recycle, or return it personally to the Island Pages office at 353 Hanamau Street, Unit 21 in Kahului.
Hawaiian Telcom has two books, a large one, called Hawaiian Telcom Yellow Pages, with both white and yellow pages, and a small “companion guide” with only the yellow pages; this year they feature 50 pieces of artwork by local students chosen during a Maui County Keiki Art Contest.
These telephone books are delivered to your doorstep. Approximately 100,00 copies of the large book and about 70,000 copies of the small one are distributed on Maui. A spokesperson for Hawaiian Telcom told me they are the “official directories for the state of Hawaii… we definitely want to be responsible and we offer a recycle program.”
You can recycle all phone books, new and old, until March 28 at Aloha Recycling in Kahului, located at 75 Amala Place, across from VIP Cash n Carry. They’re open on Monday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Tuesday – Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Last year, 56,972 pounds of phone books – the big books weigh about two and a half to three pounds and the small ones weigh about a pound – were diverted from the landfill. That number represents approximately 23,000 books.There are approximately 330,000 phone books distributed on Maui yearly – about 297,000 books, or more than 600,000 pounds of printed paper, are unaccounted for; the remainder either end up in the landfill or are still in people’s homes.
When I spoke recently with Aloha Recycling’s Manager, Sherri Pell, she said, “About 70 percent of the phone books we received in the first week of this program were brand new ones still in the bag, never opened. It’s a tremendous amount of work for everyone, especially for the schools. They have to collect the books, load them up and bring them to us; Kula School already has made four trips this year. We’ve had about 4,500 pounds of books brought in as of February 29. We send them by container to Port Angeles, Washington, where Nippon Paper Industries converts them back into paper. There’s no money in phone books for us, though. We have to take them from the trucks, weigh them and put them in boxes for storage until we have enough for a container load. They must be loose in the containers, so we then take them out of the storage boxes and load the containers for shipment to Washington, making sure there’s no cardboard or plastic or newspapers mixed in. But we’re happy to do it because it keeps the books out of our landfill.”
Hawaiian Telcom sponsors a contest each year for Maui Schools, K-12, both public and private, offering five prizes based on the total weight of telephone books collected, ranging from $700 for first place to $100 for fifth place. They are the only phone company that does so, by the way, and you can recycle any telephone book through this program, to benefit the participating schools, but only old telephone books are accepted for the contest. To receive credit for the books collected, schools must drop off the old telephone books at Aloha Recycling, who. will keep a tally of the total weights of directories collected and provide a receipt to the school each time books are dropped off.
As we go to press, the following schools have signed up to participate in this contest:
Hana High & Elementary
Kihei Charter School
Kula Elementary School
Maui High School
Montessori Hale o Keiki
Montessori School of Maui
Seabury Hall Middle School
Paia Elementary School
Waihee Elementary School
Baldwin High School
Lanai High & Elementary School
Molokai’s Kaunakakai Elementary and
Kualapuu Elementary.
For questions about Hawaiian TelCom’s recycle program or to sign up, call Stephanie Ortega at 808-543-3548, visit www.HTYellowpages.com or call Sherri Pell, Manager of Aloha Recycling, at 808-871-8544.
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Jan Welda
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