The Stationery Project
An investigation of paper waste and methods of reusing rather than recycling.

I co-founded The Stationery Project in early 2018 with Katherine Gillieson using the funding from the Ian Gillespie Research Grant. Our goal was to assess issues of paper waste at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD) in Vancouver, and find effective ways to divert scrap paper from the waste-stream, and into functional stationery.
We worked out how to use the found paper in the most effective ways, to give a second life to something considered as "garbage", and to do so with as little energy/resource waste as possible. In these months we also implemented various systems to collect scrap paper, and we received a large donation of discarded file-folders from the ECUAD library.
Visit the project blog here.
The Notebook Line



The notebook line includes various formats to deal with the different types of scrap paper that is collected. There is a Notepad (left), which is made from bright, colourful paper that often has ink bleeding through the back-side. The Small Notebook (centre) made from paper that is mostly clean on both sides, but has dirt, ink marks or small printed matter. The Slimbook (right) is made from paper that has content printed on one side, but that can be folded in half to conceal that previous content.
In late 2018 we developed a new format, the Jumbo Pad (below) that is made from all sorts of paper weights, colours and various prints that is bound with a recyclable metal wire.

The Detail





The Calendar

As a special project near the end of 2018 we designed a year-at-a-glance calendar. This was printed with soy-based ink on discarded tabloid sized paper with our Risograph printer.


Katherine Gillieson and I are grateful to have Cameron Neat, Jaz Halloran, Kathleen Jacques, Medha Mistry, Jonathan Yaputra and Joshua Singler as supportive members of the project.
It is thanks to the Ian Gillespie Research Grant that The Stationery Project continues to grow, expand and evolve.