Interviewer:  Hi, I’m Gail Nickel-Kailing, I’m with WhatTheyThink Going Green, and today I’m here with Jerome Elion who is VP of Marketing with Green Books & Binders. 

Jerome Elion:  Hi.

Interviewer:  And Jerome, is - Jerome and his company, is the winner of this year’s Beyond Innovation Award for WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovations Award.  So, you have gone above and beyond to create a new product.  Tell us about your recycled and recyclable binder. 

Jerome Elion:  Well, thank you.  We are very proud of this award from WhatTheyThink and WhatTheyThink Going Green.  It is definitely a land marking industry and we’re very proud of the recognition. 

Our product is actually a very low tech product.  We are not doing, you know - and there’s many, many things out there that are far more completely sophisticated.  What we really like about our product is it serves like a real purpose.  Everybody’s using binders everywhere in, you know, every offices and so on.  So what  we’re doing is we’re actually, if you take a traditional binder, there is vinyl that is covering the binder, a clear overlay.  On the inside, you also have, you know, vinyl over chipboard.  Then you have rivets attaching a ring mechanism permanently to the binder and there is really nothing you can do with it when you dispose of it.

So what we did is we actually came up with a binder that’s entirely made of chipboard so this is made of recycled used paper, cardboard and paper clippings.  We have debased an area of the spine and on the front where it can be customized so we provide customers with blank sheets.  They can then print them, peel the label and then apply it and see like do here and apply it on their binder.

Interviewer:  No more slip sheets.  You don’t have to slide it into that vinyl cover.

Jerome Elion:  No, no more slip sheet and here  you have a custom binder.  And then the beauty about this thing is it ships flat.  So if you ship a binder, traditionally, you have to - you have a lot of space that’s, you know, unused and requiring oversized boxes and here we can ship this flat; it’s assembled by customers when they need it by just, you know, pushing down the rivets, the fastening system, through and then, you know, there’s your binder.  

So the biggest thing, I think, is when you’re done using it, when the information is no longer valuable and you dispose of your binder, today there is really no means to recycle a binder.  The cardboard is trapped into vinyl, you have  to cut it open in order to get something out and here you can’t.  so most binders end up in landfill.

Here, you just snip with a pair of scissors that little clip and you can put the metal with the metal and the cardboard with the paper.  And, you know, it’s really good for the environment.

Interviewer:  Totally recyclable.