Monroe County asks all residents and businesses to hold off on recycling year 2000 telephone books until January 2001 because the components of the books make them difficult to recycle during the holiday season.

The November delivery of the new phone books coincides with the annual two-month "holiday rush" at the county's Recycling Center, 384 Lee Road. Sorting recycled materials is performed manually and isolating the telephone directories from the holiday advertisements, newspaper inserts and gift packaging is extremely difficult with the heavier volumes.

Residents and businesses should place telephone directories in their blue boxes for regular waste hauler collection in January. After the first of the year, the paper process returns to its normal volume, allowing phone books to be separated and sent to the proper paper mill.

Few paper mills are willing to accept phone books for recycling because of their high ink content, thin paper and binding glue. Phone books are actually considered a contaminant by the paper mills that make newspaper. They cannot be included in the truckloads of newspaper, catalogs, advertising inserts and magazines that are shipped from the Recycling Center to paper mills each day.

Phone books, or any recyclable, should only be placed in brown, paper grocery bags, not plastic grocery bags, and only if a bag is needed to separate items within the blue box. Plastic bags slow the sorting process at the Recycling Center and should only be recycled at area markets, according to county officials.