by Michael Smith
This is a little DIY project of what to do with all those letters and photocopies and such that are just one side used.
If you work in an office or otherwise come across one side used only letter paper regularly – I also tend to get that spam post a lot with a covering letter that is blank on the other and also here are still press releases given out to us who write that are printed on dead trees – then you can, by use of a paper cutter, turn those pages easily into rescued paper notebooks.
Obviously you can just make notepads with those pages or print other stuff on the back of them and, with the right printing template, you can make them into all sorts of useful pages.
This is, I know, certainly not new. Many offices that I know used to do that years ago, printing phone message pads from old one side used only pages. Somewhere along the line, however, it got forgotten. What happened? The truth is Affluenza happened.
I make A6 Notebooks from those rescued pages of paper that I use in my work as a writer and journalist. Very handy as they fit into a jacket pocket with ease. I must say that I have also seen such kind of rescued paper notebooks for sale at about $15 to $20 each.
Using a guillotine (paper trimmer, I believe those things are called in the States) you can cut the paper into more or less exact sized pages in this or that format that may suit you. As we, nowadays, use the A standard, as in A4, which is our standard letter size here, for paper, which originated in the Germany DIN standard and was adopted by the then Common Market, now the European Union, and is in use in most of not in fact all of Europe, I cut the paper down to the common notebook size of A6. Once I have enough pages together I just staple them and thus make them into a notebook. About 20-25 sheets is about the maximum for a stapler, unless one uses a professional one.
Another way of making rather snazzy notebooks is to, instead of using staples, punch two holes at the margin and then, placing an popsicle stick on either side in such a manner that it is possible to tie the book together using the sticks as a backing, so to speak. This was the recycling is even more pronounced. Notebooks like that sell for even more when done by green “designers”.
So, go and make your own designer rescued paper notebook and save some trees and some money.
© M Smith (Veshengro), 2009
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Rescued Paper Notebooks
