AT&T has been testing a plan to distribute residential phone books on CD, rather than on paper. That sounds like a great idea that marries environmental benefits with cost savings, and could probably be taken a step further by only distributing the white pages in any format on request. Yellow-pages publishers are struggling as the web steals away their audience, and it's hard to imagine the white pages gets much use any more, either. But there's at least one obstacle standing in the way of the elimination of the white pages: laws in some states that require the company to publish and deliver a residential directory to every one of its customers. I'm hard pressed to remember the last time I used the white pages, and given that they don't list cell phone numbers, they're growing more and more irrelevant to many people. Burdening the phone companies with their production and distribution seems pretty pointless these days, not to mention the environmental impact of millions of the books, the vast majority of which are never used, and only a small portion of which are recycled.

Three years ago, we wrote about the fact that very few people back up the address book in their mobile phones -- and when they lose those phones, it can be like losing access to certain people. It appears not much has changed. In a more recent article, a bunch of people relate similar stories, suggesting that losing a mobile phone is like being "disconnected from life." Of course, with social networks and email and other forms of communication, it's not necessarily as dramatic, but it does make you wonder why more mobile operators don't offer services to automatically back up mobile phone address books.