Community Clothing partners stationery brand to create notebooks from denim scraps
Patrick Grant’s Community Clothing has made its jeans production zero waste by partnering with sustainable British stationery brand Mark+Fold and Cumbria based handmade paper maker The Paper Foundation, to create a range of notebooks.
The notebook covers have been made entirely from off cuts of the production of Community Clothing’s denim collection at its factory in Lancashire.
Historically, the best quality paper was apparently made from textile rags – either post-production waste or end of life garments. Community Clothing says that reviving the old method “creates a solution to the problem (of waste) the industry is facing today”.
Mark+Fold produce and sell luxury stationary, all made in the UK. The CC x Mark+Fold notebooks are being hand bound in Suffolk using a traditional Singer stitch process, with the internal paper made from sustainable FSC wood.
The heavy paper for the covers is handmade by The Paper Foundation, a charity founded by sixth-generation papermaker Mark Cropper (Chair of James Cropper), who became aware that the skills and knowledge around the production of handmade paper were going to become extinct in the UK.
The notebooks will be available in two sizes, A6, priced at £12, and A5, priced at £16, in three colours of cover made using paper made from either indigo, blue or black denim scraps – with no further dyeing or bleaching.
Patrick Grant, Founder of Community Clothing, said: “This is fantastic way of both preserving incredible local skills as well as making a beautiful super quality product from material that would otherwise have gone to landfill.
“It has been a pleasure to work with both Mark+Fold and The Paper Foundation, two amazing independent British producers.”
Amy Cooper-Wright, Founder of Mark+Fold, added: “I’m a huge fan of Community Clothing and the whole ethos of keeping skills alive in the UK. We have built the Mark+Fold brand around a pride in sharing the making story behind every item of stationery that we make.
“We always use innovative sustainable papers, but this has to be our most exciting collaboration to date, because you can trace the material from the denim factory right back around to the finished notebook, and even pop it in your jeans pocket.”
