Recycling a 3-ring binder is easy - assuming you don't have a vinyl binder. Naked Binder shows you how you can have your eco friendly 3-ring binder ready to recycle in seconds.
Tools You Need:
Flat head (standard) Screwdriver.
9 seconds.
Recycling a Vinyl Binder is harder.
First, pop out the ring, just as you saw above.
Next take a knife and cut open the vinyl about a half inch from the edge of each panel and on the spine. You will probably need to split the vinyl on at least two sides of each panel to remove the chipboard panels inside.
Now that you have the components, the board can go in the paper recycling, the metal in the metal recycling and the vinyl? Now there is a good question. time to get on the phone to find out if your city/county/state has vinyl recycling capabilities. If not, you may need to send the vinyl scraps out of state to a place that does recycle vinyl.
If you have 6 binders, this is a pain, takes about 30 minutes, a couple dollars in postage and a bit of research. If you are a corporation with 10,000 binders, this is more serious. Besides the time to seperate each component, Landfills consider vinyl a toxic asset in large quantities. The 3,000 pounds of vinyl you have will need to be shipped or stored indefinitely.
In these cases, the per binder cost sky rockets. Including labor, storage and shipping (along with short life and toxicity) into the binder price may convince you that the initial cost savings were not worth it.
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