Reduce Your Staple Use By VaLerie K
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Staples – so tiny, so innocuous, so ubiquitous. Who would think they are a big planetary pollution culprit? But they are.
According to Practical Environmentalist website, common office staples “gobble up energy at every step of their production and use”. The ore to make the galvanized steel has to be mined, transported, smelted to form staples one at a time, the staples are re-heated and coated with a layer of zinc, cooled and assembled into stacks, packaged, transported again to be sold in stores, many are thrown out during use (I don’t know about you, but for every successful staple, I often blow through a couple that don’t work out), and on top of all that they put a strain on the paper recycling stream by jamming machinery and necessitating industrial magnets and screening filters to get the little buggers outta there, and after they are removed they are too tiny to recycle so they end up in a landfill anyhow. SHEESH!
…Solutions?
There are commercial ‘staple free staples’ out there, which punch a hole through the pages and fold back the punched-out bit at the same time – a brilliant idea. But I’ll do you one better. I learned a ridiculously simple technique when I was little (I must have had a hippie teacher way ahead of her time).
1. Fold back the corner of your stack of papers to form a triangle, like so:
2. Then you can cut (or you can tear, as I used to do with my eight-year-old fingers) two small slits within the triangle, creating a tab.
3. Fold the tab in the opposite direction to your triangle.
And viola!
The pages will stay together just as well as if you had stapled with environment-ruining little staples. It’s even better than paper clips… wait, paper clips… awww, don’t get me started! (Well at least you can make bracelets out of them)
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info sources: PracticalEnvironmentalist.com (and a student teacher I don’t remember)
April 24th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I really detest staples in paper items. I have a staple puller like the one pictured, and use it often. I used to get very annoyed at our pharmacy, because they would staple through the receipt that we send in for medicine refunds. Now they have a different receipt system, but still use staples. In the past I have used the fold the corners and tear system that you show, but had forgotten about it, so thanks for the reminder!
April 27th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
oh dang, maybe it was my own mother who taught me that. well, you always were ahead of your time!
December 1st, 2010 at 6:21 pm
I learned this trick as a kid, too! What is your take on binder clips or paper clips: reusable…