To save trees, reduce recycling hassels, and quit the clutter, a lone college student has launched Yellow Pages Goes Green, a campaign to eliminate the unsolicted delivery of phone books.

When you receive the yellow and white slabs on your front step, do you:

a)  Plop them in a corner for use as a door stop or high chair?

b)  Test your strength by attempting to tear one in half?

c)  Peruse the pages in search of new friends, baby names, or prank call victims?

d)  Continue construction of your phone directoy fortress to keep out unsolicited mail?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, the time has come to remove yourself from the vicious phone book cycle.  And you should probably get out more.  While some people still use phone books for actually looking up numbers, most of us could probably live happily without the old clunkers.

takepart by opting out of receiving phone books and support the movement to eliminate waste and save paper.  It’s free, easy, and who knows what new hobbies you might take up!

Thanksgiving is second in a slew of holidays at this time of year that have become one extended caloric nightmare.  Marketers have successfully driven consumers to celebrate these holidays in an atmosphere of frenzied food consumption, often from everyday pre-packaged products festooned with special holiday cheer.  However, you can say no to the pre-packaged cheer and have a hearty, sustainable meal.  Below are 10 tips to a healthier, humane, sustainable, “low carb(on)” and labor friendly Thanksgiving from some fantastic organizations, some of whom we’re working with for the Social Action campaign for our film, Food, Inc.

1. Buy produce from your local farmers market.  Rather than eating grapes from Mexico, apples from Argentina or potatoes from China, purchase as much of your holiday produce from a local farmer! takepart with the Eat Well Guide to find one near you.

2. Buy organic produce whenever possible.  Organic produce is safer, tastes better than conventional produce and is readily available at farmers markets and supermarkets nationwide.  Also, look for organic wines, beverages and condiments.

3. Support a farm worker.  Thousands of migrant workers labor in dangerous, brutal conditions for little pay to bring food to our table every day. takepart to help to improve the lives of farm workers and their families through the United Farm Workers.

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Well, we missed another “holiday,” this time being America Recycles Day.  It was Saturday.  Now, treehugger thinks this is a (explitive deleted) holiday, and we should make November 15 Zero Waste Day.  Part of the reasoning is that America Recycles Day is brought to you by the fine people that make things that are put in recyclable despensers: Coke, Bud, Coors, the bottled water industry, and so forth.  It seems also that they’re not too happy with the fact that recycling is a transfer of responsibility from corporations to taxpayers. But what they fail to realize are these very impressive and completely false facts about recycling:

–Every time you say “I don’t believe in recycling,” a fairy dies.

–Did you know that the energy saved from recycling just one can is enough to power the sun for fifty years?

–Recycling comes from the Latin, “recyclicaie,” which means “to be way sexy.”

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Greetings TakePart faithful! We’ve got some exciting news - TakePart is now optimized for your iPhone. Anytime, anywhere you can bust out your sleek iPhone 3G and learn all about ways you can TakePart to make the world a better place.

Speaking of, are you thinking of ditching your old cellphone for an Apple iPhone? Before you take the plunge to AT&T, buy a ton of iPhone apps, and upgrade to iPhone 1.1.4 takepart and donate your old phone to for recycling. It’s the green way to get dispose of your phone and all proceeds go to charity.

Flipside Vision, an environmentally conscious British publisher, has released it’s Calendar of Climate Change for 2009 to inspire green choices in the year to come.  Obviously the calenders are printed on recycled paper and printed with vegetable dyes, and maintain the companies philosophy of Eco-Propaganda:

The organised dissemination of information to assist the cause of the planet and its future viability for all species.

While it’s unfortunate that an entire calendar can be devoted to the effects of climate change, hopefully the images and stories will serve as a reminder to stay vigilante about the problems we face.
takepart by ordering your copy of the Calendar of Climate Change and learn more from the Stop Climate Change Chaos Coalition.

Related: Inconvenient Truth of the Day

A crew for the CBS investigative journalism program 60 Minutes was roughed up at a Chinese electronic waste site. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his crew were in the Middle Kingdom to trace the illegal black market electronic waste in the world’s most populous country. Upon entering a facility in Guiyu, on the south coast of China, the crew was attacked by a gang of workers who attempted to take their cameras. The crew managed to escape and brought back footage of the incident to air on CBS this week.

The workers at the facility had reason to want to take the cameras as their activities are highly illegal even in the loosely regulated world of Chinese industry. Improper dismantling of e-waste for the black market, as was being done in Guiyu, produces some of the most harmful pollutants known to man. The City of Guiyu is afflicted with some of the highest levels of cancer causing agents on Earth while pregnancies there are 6 times more likely than normal to result in miscarriage and 7 out of 10 children have too much lead in their blood.

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Ever gone berserk over the impossible-to-open and excessive packaging of something you got in the mail?  Well, Amazon has come to the rescue with Frustration-Free Packaging, which is designed to reduce the stress level of opening packages, as well as the waste created from shipping. The company is working directly with manufacturers to eliminate all the excess plastic, cardboard, twist-ties and hassle, to send products in minimally packaged recyclable boxes.  Love it.

Check out a video demonstration

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Japanese Electronics Giants Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba announced plans to participate in a massive electronics program last week. The corporations will be joining forces with Manufacturers Recycling Management LLC in creating a national recycling infrastructure for their products via a 50 state rollout of recycling centers by January of 2009. The first phase of the program will start of this month in California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin expanding to the rest of the nation throughout next year.

This is a very important program to eliminate the industrial waste of components within our electronic items. Landfills and conventional recycling programs across the country simply do not have the resources of know how to properly handle the complicated components in our laptops, stereos, televisions and boom boxes. Worse yet, many programs which advertise that they will in fact “recycle” these items, actually ship them to impoverished countries for disadvantaged people to try and salvage small amounts of gold and other substances out of them by hand, an unsafe practice which is causing a human health crisis around the world.

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Comedy Central wants to teach you easy ways to reduce waste and help revive the planet! Through their on-air and online ‘Address the Mess’ campaign, Comedy Central is helping viewers reduce their carbon footprint. And on Sunday, November 9th, from 10am-4pm as Address the Mess takes over the WEST part of Union Square between E 15 & E 16th Street to help New Yorkers properly recycle their old appliances. With the support of the Lower East Side Ecology Center and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, Address the Mess plans to raise awareness around the environmental crisis and collect all the unwanted e-ware gathering dust in your homes. By coming to this event participants have the chance to win two front row tickets to Brian Regan’s performance at the New York Comedy Festival.

Check out this video about Address the Mess featuring talented comedian (and my dear pal) Al Jackson:

Discarded electronics contribute to over 70% of the toxins found in our nation’s landfills. So if you live in NYC come out to Union Square next Sunday and Address the Mess. takepart and visit http://www.addressthemess.com for more information on this event and to learn other environmentally friendly steps you can take everyday.

I’ve always been a big fan of making my own Halloween costumes, and I’m also a big procrastinator, so what better way to get your spooks on then cobbling together a last-minute eco-friendly costume?  Who needs all the plastic waste and boringness of store-bought costumes, when with a little ingenuity you can impress the  superhero skivvies off your Halloween date.  Gina also has some excellent costume ideas to dress for the New Depression.  So dig through your closet, your recycling bin, or a nearby thrift store, grab you canvas bag for candy and ring those doorbells!

1. Non-GMO Corn (pictured):  Borrow my idea from last year when I was an ear of corn!  Paint a strip of large-bubble wrap with non-toxic yellow paint, tape it around your torso, wear green pants and a green hoodie for the husk, and a blond wig for the silk.  Extra credit for keeping it organic with a non-GMO sign.

2. Christmas Tree:  I wish I had the pictures to share, but in college I borrowed my brother’s idea and went out as a Christmas Tree.  Real simple. Green shirt, brown pants, and a strand of energy-saving LED Christmas lights wrapped around your body.  Watch the crowd light up when you plug yourself in at the party!  I added a little extra flair and taped hand-drawn paper ornaments to my chest and a star to my forehead, but I leave the details up to you.

3. Planet Earth: 

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