Last week I arrived home one night to find a plastic bag hanging from the doorknob. It was the 2007-2008 telephone directory from Cable & Wireless. My first thought was "great, now there's going to be another 50,000 old phone directories in the landfill" but I just couldn't bring myself to throw it in the bin. It felt... wrong.

I sent an IM to a friend who works at Cable & Wireless and asked if they had any takebacks or recycling program for telephone directories. I didn't think they would, recycling is woefully non-existent in the Cayman Islands but it never hurts to ask, right?

The next day I received an email from her with the following:

Cable & Wireless has partnered with the non profit organization Global Green Caribbean to collect old telephone directories for recycling. Other partners in this initiative are CayShred and Fosters Food Fair. We have added our Anderson Square and Galleria Plaza stores as drop off points. The drive to collect old directories will last for the next week. Persons dropping off old directories will also get a green bag while quantities last. So please help support this very worthy effort and bring in your old telephone directories to either of our store locations and tell a friend.

Well shave my balls and call me Harry! I took my old telephone directory and another one I found lying around and put it in the plastic bag the new one came in and put it in my jeep to drop off. I was in Foster's Food Fair at the Strand last night getting some Borax for my running clothes (to say they smell like goats is an insult to goats the world over) and I didn't see a box, a sign, a table, anything saying "drop your old phone books here" and I forgot about it.

Today I stopped by the Galleria Plaza Cable & Wireless store to drop it off. I wandered around, no bin, no signage no nothing. I asked the cashier and she referred me to one of the CSAs, so I waited in line until it was my turn. She knew what I was talking about, took my directories and even gave me a green reusable grocery bag. Sweet!

If I had not asked someone who worked at C&W, I never would have known this program existed.. and is it over this week? They REALLY could have done a much better job of letting the public know about this... Mount Trashmore is high enough already without adding literally tons of easily-recyclable paper on top of it.

I'm glad Cable & Wireless is trying to make positive changes and offer recycling, but I'm a bit cheesed off that they didn't really make it very public. Of course, I could be wrong, it HAS happened before! It could be that they're gearing up for it this week and going to kick it off next week and advertise is in the newspapers, their website and on the radio...