When I first started this blog, the intent was to focus only on higher end and nicer office supply items.  Over time I’ve had lots of emails about more basic items geared towards students on a budget.  With that in mind I figured I’d take a look at a few notebooks that fit into that category in the coming weeks.  First up though is this New Leaf Basic 100% Recycled Paper College Ruled Notebook from Amazon.

The New Leaf Basic 100% Recycled Paper Notebook contains 40% consumer waste and is made in a process without chlorine, which is usually used to whiten most paper.  It has 120 sheets of college ruled paper with two pocket dividers that make for a three subject notebook.  As you can see from the writing sample above we tried out a few fountain pens, gel ink pens, liquid ink pens, and a Sharpie Pen.

The Uniball Insight and the two fountain pens showed a bit of feathering on this paper, while the rest of the pens didn’t show much feathering at all.  overall, all of the pens wrote fairly smoothly on the surface of the paper in this notebook, however the paper has lots of flecks and impurities in it that are visible to the naked eye which can be a bit of a distraction when writing.

Show throughWhen it comes to show through on this paper, there is no winner, which really makes me mad with recycled paper.  if you cant write on the back of a page due to the show through, then it kind of defeats the purpose of trying to be environmentally friendly.  Unless you are using a cheap ballpoint or a light writing pencil you pretty much arent going to want to use both sides of the pages in this notebook.  If you are looking for a disposable scrap note kind of notebook, the New Leaf Basic 100% Recycled Paper College Ruled Notebook is a decent option, but dont expect too much from it.