Certification & Materials

Certification, the Environment and your Brand

In some ways green certifications have taken on a life of their own. They can get in the way of companies choices to do what's best for the environment and for the consumer. In the end, we think the statement made by brown recycled products is much stronger than any stamp or seal on the product. As a result, Guided doesn't actively pursue the host of certifications available for green products. We still hold our material sources to the higher standards, and the details about our contents are below.

Our Printing

Guided offers custom screen printing on many of our products. The inks we use in all standard printing are water-based acrylics, non-VOC, and non-toxic. We get asked from time to time if our screen printing inks are soy based - they are not. Even soy-based inks have only a small percentage of soy in them (7-10%) and the rest is a petroleum-based inks that require chemicals to clean up. At this time there are no soy inks for screen-printing available.

Post Consumer Recycled / Post Industrial Recycled

What's the difference? Post Consumer Recycled means that a product has gone through it's life cycle and has made it back into the recycling stream. An example of this would be anything that you toss into your recycle bin at home (old magazines, used milk cartons, soda cans, etc). Post Industrial Recycled (also called Pre-Consumer Recycled) can be defined as the left over mill scrap or the manufacturing waste left over from making a product. An example of this could be a magazine publisher that has excess paper trim left over from printing a magazine. That material can be recycled but hasn't made it's way into a usable product but gets put back into the recycling system. While both are important, it's better that we support products that are made with a highest post consumer content than post industrial. Otherwise, what's the incentive to recycle? As a society, we create a lot of waste. We also have a lot of recycled product that needs to find a home other than a landfill.

Guided uses chipboard that is 100% Recycled with a minimum 85% post consumer recycled and 15% post industrial recycled. Ideally, we would love to be able to offer 100% post consumer. However, we have made the determination that the benefit from sourcing paper fiber with lower post consumer content that is closer to our conversion facilities out weighs the higher post consumer. As part of our business model, these types of manufacturing trade-offs are core to our thought process and mission. As the economics and environmental and social impact of each trade-off change, so do we.

Shop Guided's famous recycled binder line. Click Here