As a lover of things analog, I do sometimes wonder about my carbon footprint with all my notebooks and scratch paper. While I love jotting down notes more in pen and paper than digital, I do wonder what the real cost of that habit is? So when I was perusing new products at JetPens, I was interested in the Rhodia Greenbook Notebook (A5, $13.00)
Now let me get a few biases/preconceived notions out of the way. I LOVE Rhodia notebooks. That’s definitely a point in this notebooks favor. On the other hand, in general, I’ve found recycled paper to be kind of crappy, particularly with fountain pens. Let’s see what I think of this!
The Greenbook Notebook is an A5 notebooks that is made of recycled materials. The hard plastic covers are made of recycled polypropylene, and the 80 sheets (160 pages) are made of 100% Clairefontaine 90gsm FSC-recertified recycled paper. The paper itself is white with blue graph paper.
As you can see this is a spiral notebook, and the paper is perforated for easy tear out sheets. The sheets are pre-punched for a European 2-ring binder or an A5 4-ring binder if you wish to store them that way. There are no frills on this one – just the plastic covers and the paper.
So how is the paper? Honestly it’s pretty darn good. It’s a little toothy and more porous than some other papers, but that is sort of how I expect recycled paper to feel. However, there’s no bleeding or feathering, even with medium wetter nibs and brush pens. I got a smidge of puckering on the backside when I used the highlighter, meaning this paper is not going to be good for any mixed media, and there was just a hint of bleed through there as well, but not with any other ink/pen. . I don’t have anything bad to say about the paper itself.
However, I find the grid to be kind of dark and it’s distracting as I write. I could see using this book to plot out knitting motifs or the like, but I don’t see it as a favorite everyday notebook because of that. But if graph paper is your jam, and you like the idea of using recycled materials as much as I do, this might be a great notebook for you!
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The gridlines are very heavy. I would consider a dot grid version for work meeting notes.
Fairly certain you can rest assured as using paper rather than going digital. It’s like disposable vs. re-usable bags: no one really thinks of the costs of production, which mean you need thousands of uses to make the latter beat the former on environmental footprint.
Assuming your digital device even lasted a decade (hah!), you’re almost certainly being less destructive using the paper (which is, after all recyclable, unlike much of that digital device).