The Missing 'R'

I had an epiphany recently. In my ever on-going quest to reduce my impact on the environment, I remembered the old R-R-R they taught me in elementary school.... and I realized, we've all been glossing over the first and second 'R's. Reduce - Reuse - Recycle. Be honest now, how many people kind of skip right to recycle and gloss over the whole reduce and reuse parts? Especially 'reuse'?

This was highlighted to me at my office where people are really good at recycling waste paper... except a lot of it is blank on one side. So, I've started collecting the reusable paper to cut up and turn into notepads. People will now reuse the scrap paper and then recycle it. Maybe the notepads will also help remind everyone about the other poor, forgotten Rs.

Here's the proper tutorial that inspired me, over on an awesome blog on The Small Object. But I couldn't find any padding compound locally and I heard school glue works just as well so that's what I used. (It works okay, I think padding compound might be better. I have to do a few coats of school glue to get good coverage.)

I cut the paper on a paper cutter to roughly the same size, paint some glue on my stack of paper (I'll split this up into thinner pads when its dry), stack some books on top to keep it all in place, and wait for it to try. Stupid easy project. Give it a try!




While you're waiting for the glue to dry - try to think up other ways you can Reduce and Reuse to lighten our load on the planet!