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Starbucks Coffee Japan Co., Ltd. launched the Starbucks Campus Ring Notebook, made of recycled milk cartons, at Starbucks stores across Japan and online on August 30. This product was developed in collaboration with KOKUYO Co., Ltd.

As part of the efforts to contribute to the realization of a recycling society, Starbucks has been recycling milk cartons since 2010. Annually, 1,000 tons of milk cartons are recycled into toilet paper, paper napkins, and hand-cleaning tissues used at Starbuck’s stores. At its stores across Japan, employees attentively wash empty milk cartons one by one every day and put them together in a form that is easy to collect.

The aspirations and actions of Starbucks resonated with KOKUYO Co., Ltd., as it developed recycled paper made mainly of the milk cartons, and used that paper for the front and back covers of Starbucks Campus Ring Notebook.

“Illustrations on the front cover express our message, aspiring to realize a sustainable society, which is the purpose of our efforts,” noted Starbucks Coffee Japan. “Also depicted on the cover is the story of how the milk cartons are recycled and reborn as notebooks. Our message that we wish to convey with this notebook can also be found in the back of the front cover.”

Grid lines are also printed on the pages so that they are useful for creating diagrams and graphs, and other purposes such as organizing the ideas and structures of proposal documents. Pages are perforated so they can be neatly cut out of the notebook. Notebooks are available in A5 size, which is easy to carry around and open on tables. There are five colors available – four limited-edition colors of blue gray, pink, khaki, and gray, in addition to the regular color of white, in association with Starbucks Coffee’s fall promotion theme, Be Colorful.

Starbucks Coffee noted that the limited-edition colors are very popular and are currently out of stock. But shoppers, don’t worry if the white color is unavailable, according to company representatives, it will only be temporarily out-of-stock as the white notebook is sold throughout the year.

Through these notebooks, Starbucks and KOKUYO together express their hopes to “take actions with our customers leading to the sustainable society. We hope that the notebooks will help our customers express their creativities and take a step forward into the future.”