Local Gringos: Postmodern Pioneers: The Yellow Pages Project

Friday, March 6, 2009

The Yellow Pages Project - Free Paper, Going Fast!

Yesterday at my local post office I saw a huge bin of new phone books for distribution to our neighborhood. On the bin was a sign reading "Please Do Not Dump Old Books Here." I guess that means all of last year's phone books are headed for the landfill.

The "Dex" yellow pages volume for the greater Albuquerque area has close to 2,000 pages, plus another 700 pages or so for the white pages volume. Multiply that by the 217,346 households in Albuquerque - yep, I looked it up - and you get a minimum of 586,834,200 pieces of paper dumped in the landfills every year. (Of course, that's assuming that every household has only one set of phone books, I'm sure many have two or more.)

That's at least 600 million pages of free paper going to waste, every year.

I came home with my new phone books, but took our old books - we have one set - to my craft room. This is the beginning of my "Yellow Pages Project": I want to make something with my nearly 3,000 pages of annual free paper!

Here's my first Yellow Pages Project: making paper beads.

I found basic instructions for making paper beads on WikiHow and Paper University. Over at A Storybook Life, she's making them from newspaper; Natasha Fialkov is using origami paper. There are loads more examples, just Google.

Here's a photo of today's Yellow Pages beads, drying now. I wrapped them on recycled cocktail straws, and used a strawberry box for a drying rack.

Tomorrow I'll play with inks & glaze to finish them.