Question: It’s back to school and I was looking for recycled notebooks the other day in Staples — to no avail. Do you know anywhere in the Santa Monica area to get recycled paper / notebooks?? Thanks -Caitlin

Answer: Little did Staples and Office Depot know that by saying no to the eco-friendly office supplies company Sustainable Group back in the day, they lost a whole niche of customers like you.

Which is to say: Head over to Whole Foods. I know — they usually don’t have notebooks and stuff, but they do now. Pictorial proof comes from my visit to the Santa Monica store yesterday — where I discovered at the checkout line I’d forgotten my wallet and had to run home and back in the heat wave to buy bread and wine –

Back to the notebooks: Whole Foods gives you 2 options:

* New Leaf notebooks. These’re high post-consumer content recycled paper notebooks, including the new Rewrite from Sustainable Group. New Leaf‘s basically providing branding for the Sustainable Group products sold at Whole Foods — which includes not just notebooks but also the Rebinder, the Repocket, the Resleeve, and others.

* Harvest Collection notebooks. These’re tree-free notebooks — meaning the paper’s made out of tropical fibers in Costa Rica under sustainable, fair trade guidelines.

Office Depot’s recently made a new green page to attract green consumers — without actually carrying super green stuff like the notebooks mentioned here. If Office Depot and Staples lose enough biz to Whole Foods, maybe they’ll go crawling back to Sustainable Group –

3 Comments