Sensis goes carbon neutral

The arrival of the yellow pages can be quite an annoyance, expecially for a greenie like me. For days the books lie piled up next to the front door of our building, soaking in the rain or bleaching in the sun, until someone takes pity and chucks the moulding pile into the recycling bin. Mostly I end up doing that.

To be fair, I live in a young neighbourhood. The couple on top of us has just had a baby, and the guy two doors down drives a shiny ute and keeps snakes as pets, as I recently found out. It is an Internet community. But the traditional hardcopy yellow pages seem to be surviving the Internet age. The have proven to be quite stubborn, and thus I feel they deserve a chance. More so now that Sensis, the publisher of the white and yellow pages in Australia, has gone carbon neutral and is making an effort to reduce its carbon footprint despite the fact that his paper-guzzling, tree-chomping publications are here to stay, and despite the fact that most of the time, they seem to wander straight into recycling rather than people's living rooms or offices.

Telstra-owned Sensis has just received greenhouse friendly certification from the government and plans to reduce its carbon footprint by 5 per cent. This will be done through offsetting 170,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing the number of yellow pages printed, even though they account for the largest percentage of the company's carbon footprint. Other measures the company intends to take include more recycling, more four cylinder diesel cars in the Sensis fleet and a greater use of video conferencing to cut back on emission-causing travel. There are no plans to make the publication a special order, but an opting-out option exists in the form of a 1-800 number on the front page of the books.

Sensis describes its move as a world-first, saying that even though their publication may have a significant imact on our environment, there are no plans to cut back on production as people still seem to be using the yellow pages hardcopy extensively. The company has committet to making sure its carbon footprint is as low as it can get while continuing to put out millions of printed telephone books annually.