Cambridge residents with no need for traditional telephone directories will be able to tell companies that stack the volumes around town without prompting to book it, if a proposed bill passes.

Cambridge City Councilor Sam Seidel said he presented the proposal March 17 after speaking with a resident concerned about the environmental impact of unused phone books. Seidel said he believes people still use the paper version to look up numbers, but younger generations prefer to use the Internet to find contacts.

“If that’s true, there’s no reason to produce a 1,500-page book,” he said.

The order asks the city manager to explore the possibility of creating and enforcing a local “opt out” list, modeled after the federal “do not call” registry, so residents would receive phone books unless they were to indicate otherwise.

The Cambridge City Council passed other sustainability initiatives dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and fuel and water use, but had not noticed all the phone books stacked up from delivery every few months, Seidel said.

The language of the order only refers to yellow pages, the commercial listings in phone books, and says nothing about white pages, the residential listings.

Seidel said the Yellow Book Association called to tell him of the existing opt-out options after the council order passed.

“The first thing I want to know is that their program is up and running,” said Seidel, “If it truly is, then we all need to do a better job of informing people about it.”

Boston City Councilor Salvatore LaMattina proposed a similar ordinance that would levy fines for delivering any material weighing more than a pound to residents who have not requested the material.

LaMattina’s proposal has yet to receive a hearing and Seidel, who said he had not talked to LaMattina about it, called the Boston proposal a “spontaneous coincidence.”

“The way that I have been thinking about it is that this is an idea whose time has come,” Seidel said. “Whenever things come together like this it means minds are thinking alike about an issue.”

Stephanie Hobbs, Marketing Communications Vice President for the Yellow Book Association, said though similar legislation has come up during the past two years all over the country, “very little” of it has made it out of committee.

Hobbs said local legislation would create a mess of regulations for phone book publishers since the Yellow Book Association already provides environmentally friendly guidelines for its members, like opt-out numbers in their books.

“Since last year, 13.4 billion times people used the directory,” she said. “We don’t think it’s dead yet.”

People used the Yellow Pages directory 13.4 billion times in both 2006 and 2007, but searches on the online directory Superpages.com grew to more than 4.8 billion in 2007, said Charlsi Thomann, senior staff consultant for Superpages.com’s parent company Idearc Media. Idearc also publishes print yellow pages for Verizon.

Thomann said in an email that while Internet is growing, printed phone books are stable.

“Saying no one uses the print yellow pages is like saying no one reads the newspaper anymore,” Thomann said.