Rodrigo Jaroseski won the grand prize in the Spring Greening upcycling contest hosted by Inhabit.com. He took home a  gift certificate of $200 to the Inhabitat shop for his incredible Phone Book Coffee Table! In the age of the Internet, heavy paper phone books are an environmental catastrophe, so this inspired reuse of an ubiquitous material struck us (and many readers) as a stroke of genius.

Here's what Inhabit.com had to say about the entry:

When we kicked off our Spring Greening DIY Design Contest we didn’t expect our intrepid innovators to take the call literally! We’re thoroughly impressed that Rodrigo Jaroseski of Porto Alegre, Brazil did just that and fashioned a remarkable corrugated coffee table out of several old phone books. Everyone seems to have a couple of these outdated directories collecting dust somewhere - every year in the United States alone 500 million directories are printed, and the E.P.A. estimates that they account for nearly 5% of total landfill waste. By carefully folding and gluing together the pages of several phonebooks, Rodrigo created an inspired re-use for these antiquated tree-pulp products.

Rodrigo Jaroseski won the grand prize in the Spring Greening upcycling contest hosted by Inhabit.com. He took home a  gift certificate of $200 to the Inhabitat shop for his incredible Phone Book Coffee Table! In the age of the Internet, heavy paper phone books are an environmental catastrophe, so this inspired reuse of an ubiquitous material struck us (and many readers) as a stroke of genius.

Here's what Inhabit.com had to say about the entry:

When we kicked off our Spring Greening DIY Design Contest we didn’t expect our intrepid innovators to take the call literally! We’re thoroughly impressed that Rodrigo Jaroseski of Porto Alegre, Brazil did just that and fashioned a remarkable corrugated coffee table out of several old phone books. Everyone seems to have a couple of these outdated directories collecting dust somewhere - every year in the United States alone 500 million directories are printed, and the E.P.A. estimates that they account for nearly 5% of total landfill waste. By carefully folding and gluing together the pages of several phonebooks, Rodrigo created an inspired re-use for these antiquated tree-pulp products.