Paper with a Purpose: Switch to Recycled Notebooks

Good Tuesday notebooks are beautifully designed, and printed on recycled paper, and sold in plastic-free packaging. For garden notebooks, read up on pet-friendly gardens and how to stop birds flying into windows.

Although FSC-paper is better than normal, it’s even better to choose notebooks made from post-consumer waste, to use up waste paper, save trees and stop horrible smells at landfill, caused by methane gas from rotting paper.

Pretty Dung Notebooks (profits help elephants!)

Paper High sells these beautiful notebooks with a difference. They are made from a blend of recycled paper and elephant dung! Use with refillable writing pens.

These note books have a serious side. Abroad, wild elephants are often harmed, due to trampling on crops. So by paying local villagers to collect the dung, they see elephants as income opportunities (and friends) rather than competing for food.

You are also helping to provide income for a mostly female team of artisans in Sri Lanka who produce the notebooks. So each notebook has unique flecks, depending on what your elephant friend ate that day! And as the average elephant eats around the same as us chomping down 300 cans of baked beans each day, that’s a lot of dung!

CoffeeNotes (notepads from old coffee cups!)

CoffeeNotes is a unique company in Dorset, which makes beautiful notebooks. The difference is that they are made from recycled coffee cups. Most disposable coffee cups can’t be recycled, as they contain 5% plastic.

So this company melts down the cups to use the paper for the books, and then uses the plastic as ‘energy’ to make the cups!

All are vegan (bar one pad, made with recycled wool cover).

The to-do list pads are ideal as reminders or for shopping lists. Sold in a pack of three tall pads, each one has 60 tear-off pages with lined tick box sections and dotted sections, and dotted reverse sides.

The wire-bound pads contain dotted pages, and a folded cover so no glue is needed, the spiral spine is easily recycled. Also in plain and lined versions.

The stitched pads have recycled softback covers and the set includes plain, lined and dotted pages.

The planner features a cover made from real coffee waste, and a seven-day layout to plan your week. With blank columns for weekdays, and spaces for tasks and reminders.

Also as an organiser pad with tear-away pages and three flexible spaces for lists, notes and doodles.

A Boxed Set of Recycled Wildlife Note Cards

This boxed set of notecards is printed on recycled materials, and features all kinds of wonderful wildlife friends. Helps to save the trees they live in! And each card is blank inside, for your own personal message.

The set includes 10 notecards, each with a recycled envelope. Printed by a specialist company in the UK, the cards feature: