Survivor Eskwela : Recycled Notebooks

 It  is school time again. Parents are pre-occupied with buying school supplies for their children, including notebooks.

I remembered one of the school survival tactics that my late father did for us,  his five children, was recycling notebooks. At that time, i was some sort of a quandary why was it that my classmates and cousins always have brand new notebooks while we used mostly recycled ones during my elementary and high school days. .

My father was a librarian in a government agency, the defunct National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) . He had access to the binding section of the library, thus, he taught us at an early age how to value recycling. He will usually gather our old notebooks or will ask our cousins to give to him their leftover notebooks. Remove the coils, separate the unused part, bind them  and alas, we have our recycled notebooks.

People wonder why we have several stuff in our house which Papa did not want to dispose, especially the shoes. Papa justified this by saying that while he was growing up, he never had the luxury of owning new ones since both he and mama came from a family with very modest means. He tried to instill this in us such that long before ukay-ukay became famous, we were already wearing secondhand clothes and shoes, sleeping on beds, sitting on chairs and sofas that papa bought from the secondhand shops in Bangkal. Seldom did we wear brand-new clothes, except maybe during Christmases when our Titas bought us clothing on an installment basis - one Tita would buy us pants while another took care of the shirts. Never mind the shoes, andyan naman ang Bangkal. We became the walking models for ukay-ukay.

When we were growing up, I remember times when Mama scolded us, “Buti nga kayo di nyo naranasan ang magtinda ng kamatis sa palengke.” Then she would cry. Perhaps, this was her way of saying that whatever the benefits we were enjoying then were due to their hard work..This is something that children have to realize: that parents will sacrifice a lot for the future of the kids. If mama would say the “kamatis” story, Papa, on the other hand, would tell us stories when he was still a security guard in a government agency before they got married in July 1968. Papa was a security guard by day and a student by night taking up library science. When he graduated, he proceeded to be a librarian in the same office until he retired in early 1990s.

How to remove the coil from a spiral-bound notebook

Whether your notebook is bound together with a plastic or metal coil, you should remove this portion of the notebook before recycling the paper and the cover. Here are two methods for removing a notebook’s coil you can try:

• Unwind: Start by securing the notebook on a counter or table with the coil hanging over the edge. Weigh it down with a heavy object and then find the crimped parts (at each end) of the coil. Snip off both crimped portions and then start to pull the coil out of the holes. It should unspiral until the whole thing comes free.
• Pull: Many types of plastic coils have separate “rings” for each hole in your journal or notebook. That means removing it can be as easy as pulling the coil from the bound-side of your journal. The pages should all be separate and ready to recycle.

Assemble the notebook by threading a shoe lace, wool, string, wire or whatever, from the front to the back, cross over and then through from the back to the front again, tying off with a reef knot and bow.Now, you have your recycled notebook.