Out of Syllabus

PENalty

I vividly remember the day I started writing with a pen in school. 

I was given some money to buy a pen of my choice. With that, I headed straight to the school stationery shop after dumping my bag in my classroom and asked for a blue gel pen. I had even dreamt of it the previous night! 

The lady behind the counter gave me a sleek and lightweight, blue-coloured pen with a transparent cap and I handed her ₹7 in coins. Now, the pen was mine and I clipped it to the neck of my pinafore and walked towards the assembly ground with the air of someone wearing a diamond necklace!

It doesn’t end here: After going home, I showed it to my grandfather for his scrutiny. He examined it thoroughly and gave it a satisfactory score. Then, he remarked that he used only two kinds of fountain pens when he was a schoolboy, and went on to explain the arduous task of filling ink in a fountain pen, replenishing the nibs and dealing with ink on hands and clothes, even after he became a teacher. 

I carefully put my pen in my pen-stand which held a few pencils and a couple of pens salvaged from my mother’s desk, while thinking of the time my grandfather told me how pencils were sharpened using a blade when I had showed him a fancy sharpener.

Maybe my first-pen-day stands in my memory because of the feeling of self-importance that buying a grown-ups’ writing instrument gave me. But now when I look back, it seems like I got sucked into a kind of use-and-throw habit that education does not question and environmentalism did not really seem to mind and that lasted throughout my school life.

Sometimes, I wonder where my first pen is right now. Was it incinerated or recycled? Is it lying in a landfill or inside a whale’s stomach? If it is the latter, then is the whale dead or alive?

An INKy carbon footprint

I came to know only recently that nearly 5 million units of the same pen that I had bought as my first pen are sold every month in India. 

Most of us use dozens of pens every year – ball-point pens, gel pens, rollerball pens and fountain pens. People who write more, especially students, keep many of them handy. When it is exam season, we ponder over which pen to use or try to figure out which one has been fairly ‘lucky’ when it comes to marks and pen manufacturers take advantage of this situation through creative advertising. 

The top pen companies in India claim to manufacture 2.5 million pens daily and sell 5 million a day. One billion pens were sold in 2019, claims one company. Even conservative estimates show that we use approximately 4,444,444 pens every day. 

Those are gargantuan figures indeed. And of course, there are so many pen manufacturers, big and small, elite and inexpensive, which add to these.

As you would have guessed correctly by now, this will end up as a huge amount of waste. The majority of pens we find today have plastic bodies and not all of them are recycled. 

However, it is not only about the waste generated, but also about the resources used, the emissions during the manufacturing process and the longevity cum durability of the end product. All of that adds up to your carbon footprint when you use up a pen. 

Put in a figurative way, we are writing a considerable section of our own carbon footprints.

When you oPEN a pen

A typical pen has a body, also called the ‘writing utensil’ and an ink refill. The body may be of the retractable type, which has a spring inside or may have a cap instead. The cap has a clip which may or may not be metallic. Some pens have a rubber-like material fitted for better grip.

A gel pen, as the name suggests, uses ink in the form of pigments suspended in a water-based gel. A ball-point pen, again as its name suggests, has in its nib a tiny ball which rotates when the pen is written with and thus regulates the flow of ink. 

The plastic out of which a typical pen is made is polypropylene copolymer (PPC). It is a fossil fuel derivate like all other plastics and almost all manufacturers use virgin material for their pens.

Coming to fountain pens, which currently cling to a 10% share in the market, these too have evolved to generate a considerable amount of waste to compete with the relatively cheap ball-point pens, which in turn account for 70% of all the pens sold. Although metallic writing utensils are very much in use, plastic ones dominate classrooms now and ink bottles have been replaced by plastic cartridges containing ink. These cartridges spare us from inky fingers, but in my opinion get empty pretty quickly. A cartridge is like a refill, there is no use for it once it is over.

Sustainable alternative PENding

The problem of literary litter has been addressed before. School and college students in Kerala were asked to ditch their single-use pens and start using fountain pens instead by environmental activist Lakshmi Menon. 

Such a movement would have surely built awareness. However, since typical fountain pens are a bit messy and the ink is not waterproof, enter examinations and students resort to ball-point pens and gel pens. 

I remember making sure that my gel pen's ink was waterproof by testing it before my Class 10 board exams.

Plastic is not entirely bad. It is the way it is used and disposed that is questionable for its imprudence. The gel pen I have been using for five years now can be refilled.

Wait for it. 

The refill is almost as big as the pen and each one comes in a plastic pack. I did not throw away any of the refills, refill caps and the packs that I used for quite a few months and unsurprisingly, a sizeable amount of plastic waste got accumulated. 

I decided to replace my pen with a sustainable one once my Class 12 exams got over. I thought that fountain pens would be fine but the non-waterproof ink makes it unreliable, especially during exams. 

I started looking for a pen that fitted my bill, only in vain.

A half-hearted PENance

Few pen companies offer refills for their pens and those who do so think that it is the best they can do for the environment. Using a new refill for the existing pen instead of buying a new pen is of course a good thing, but simply not enough. 

There is so much more to be done to make the stationery industry, one which directly related to youngsters, sustainable and responsible. It must not turn the next generation into a horde of thoughtless consumers just for their business.

Some manufacturers and start-ups are making recycled writing utensils of cardboard or paper in place of plastic. Such pens are ball-point or gel. To add to the ‘eco-appeal’, a couple of seeds are fitted into the cap. This gives buyers the impression that once the ink in the pen is over, they can just throw it anywhere and lo, they have done a ‘green deed’ by planting a tree! 

However, the refill inside these cardboard writing utensil is very much made of plastic. There are also plastic fittings in some of the writing utensils, which are easily removable. The refill and these tiny bits of plastic pose as a threat to the environment as they are not biodegradable like the rest of the writing utensil.

Just like most mobile phones in today’s world, many pens do not last long. My search for a long-lasting pen too was not successful. Ball-point pens which last long are single-use pens. I also came across a pen on the internet whose makers claimed that it could write for seven years, but according to reviews, it was not true.

A thINKing cap that works

If all of this has put you in a PENsive mood, do not despair. There are some innovative inventions that can make the pen write its way to a sustainable future.

Anirudh Sharma, a researcher at MIT, literally made ink out of thin air. Polluted air, to be precise. His team specially collects particulate matter, which is a major air pollutant released from vehicles and generators and makes ink for markers and printers from it. They go under the name Graviky Labs and the ink is called ‘AIR INK’. I do hope that they come up with a pen for everyday writing too!

Pilot, the well-known stationery company, has come up with the ‘Begreen’ series of pens, which are made of at least 75% recycled plastic and come in recyclable cardboard packaging. Their B2P commodity, that is, Bottle to Pen, is made by recycling plastic water bottles.

However, these products are not available in India as of now and if you are thinking of still buying these pens sitting in India, it would only add to your carbon footprint. 

Let’s hope that our pen manufacturers too start coming up with ingenious ideas to educate and at the same time protect the environment.

IndisPENsable

Writing instruments, especially pens, are an indispensable part of our lives. But that does not mean that they have to be disposable after a single use. 

That also does not mean that all of us should go back to writing with a specific type of pen because that would only diminish our creativity. Even my grandfather probably would not want to write with a fountain pen now. 

With the literacy rate growing in India (a good news), more people will be expected to read and write, for good. You will need a pen even when you are writing a computer-based examination. Pens are here to stay despite the increasing use of computers, phones, printers and styluses. 

Thus, pen manufacturers have a make a environmentally-conscious deal by:

·         Revising their manufacturing processes,

·         Reducing emissions and unnecessary packaging,

·         Reusing pens and ink bottles (collaboration between end-user and manufacturer), and

·         Recycling plastic, ink, and whatever else is possible.

This has to be implemented quickly. They say that the pen is mightier than the sword, but we should not let the pen turn into a sword against the Earth. 

If you happen to use pen that is refillable with waterproof ink, please let me know!