Making a Recycled Notebook

"We may recycle newspapers and glass and take proper satisfaction for doing so, but we remain caught in a web of spiritual assumptions about success and consumption, progress and waste that effectively undermine and trivialize our efforts to escape."  - William H. Becker

In preparation for graduate school, I decided to not only reuse some of my partially filled notebooks from my undergraduate days, but also use some one-sided printed paper to make a recycled notebook. I used a cereal box from my recycling bin to make the cover, three-hole punched everything, and bound it with ribbon. Instead of leaving the cover as the front of the cereal box, I used a bunch of old stickers we had lying around just waiting for a use. The end result is a thick notebook of mostly one-sided sheets of paper that didn't cost me any money beyond stuff I already had as waste from other purposes or as leftover stuff from years ago, and it reduced how much we would be throwing away or recycling by reusing instead. Have I mentioned I love finding ways to use the waste stream as a resource?

The cover in all its cheesy glory. At least it isn't an advertisement for a brand of cereal!

As you can see, the face of each sheet is blank and ready for writing. Why recycle this sheet of paper when there's still more room for words and pictures?

And while I'm at school, I have the added benefit of some pages reminding me of my budget season deadlines so I can get my department budget figured out and submitted on time. Worry not, they gave me two copies.

While I'm at it, I can use some down time to brush up on biology.

Or, if I am caught up on my studies and have some free time and my guitar with me, I could play a jazz standard.

If I'm super bored I can play this little U.S. history trivia challenge on the back of the notebook, which coincidentally enough (well, not really coincidentally) came from the back of the cereal box. I figured it was fitting since some of my course work will involve political strategy.