The Tovi Recycled notebook is a beautiful, practical, and unique notebook that combines so many benefits into one amazing product. Simple in its concept – its just a notebook after all – but it has been carefully crafted to deliver so many of our values. The Tovi notebooks are handmade by local artisans using age-old techniques, skills and traditions. They are Planet and Elephant friendly whilst creating much needed employment opportunities. Every notebook is unique as the final cover is simply a reflection of the waste plastic used.
Let’s pull apart the constituent parts of the notebooks to reveal the thinking and benefits behind this unique, handcrafted and artisan made notebook.
The Cover
Our recycled plastic cover on the Tovi notebook is made from generally unrecyclable polythene plastic food packaging waste such as biscuit and chocolate bar wrappers. Made using both pre-consumer waste plastic sourced straight from food manufacturers and post-consumer waste which is collected by many community members to help generate income for themselves and to save their local environment.
All waste plastic is collected, separated by hand into type and colour of plastic; and from there it is processed on a small-scale community focused ‘village factory’ where we shred the plastic waste into small flakes. The colourful plastic flakes are pressed using our heated sheet press to transform them from plastic flakes into solid, colourful and sparkly plastic sheets. These sheets are then cut to the size we need for notebook and notepad covers, mouse mats and place mats.
The ‘simple’ plastic covers not only stops waste plastic from either being burnt, buried, or thrown away on the beach but we create financial opportunities across our community. From our local team who collect waste plastic (and get paid for it) through to our team working in our village factory – we are creating regular and dependable income.
The Paper
We have intentionally sourced fully recycled paper for our notebooks made from Elephant dung! Our recycled elephant dung paper is handcrafted, tree-free, eco-friendly, and odourless (of course!). The benefit of our elephant dung paper is not only from an environmental perspective of recycling a natural product and using post-consumer wastepaper to create paper.
Importantly, we are helping to protect the elephants who are often seen as major problem for local villagers as the elephants often eat the farmers crops. With the ever-reducing natural habitat for elephants and the ever-expanding use of land for farmers – there is a major clash occurring with the elephants always losing out. Our paper however changes the economic situation as the same villagers can now earn income from collecting the elephant dung, we use. And of course, the ‘village factory’ provides much needed stable employment opportunities which are located out in the countryside.
The Tovi recycled plastic notebook is designed to be fully reusable. We use a simple metal ring binding to secure the pages within the plastic covers and it is therefore very easy to simply cut your own paper to size and refill the notebook. Buy once and use forever!