This semester, the Covenant College mailroom introduced stapleless staples to campus via the Canon imageRunner printer. These staples are made from the paper itself.
According to the official Canon YouTube page, “Staple Free Stapling binds the paper together with pressure, which is a great alternative to metal staples.”
After the paper is bound together, the top corner will have several grooves keeping the pages from falling apart.
Stapleless staples could have a bright future on our college campus. The senior class president, Ian Banks ’20, said, “I am very thankful that our college has decided to place a greater emphasis on ecological responsibilities and chosen to reduce our consumption of staples. The [stapler] holds paper sufficiently and is better for the environment. It is a no-lose situation.”
According to an article by David Cyron and Veronica Spencer posted on Georgia Tech’s website, “Staplers contribute over 2 million kg of CO2 equivalent of Global Warming Pollution. To put this in perspective, the stapler market accounts for over 500 passenger vehicles worth of emissions each year!”
Other benefits of this new stapler include cutting the costs of refills and broken staplers. Also, the official Canon page notes that these new staples allow for more effortless shredding, as you do not need to remove the staple beforehand, which would be a win for tired work-study students on campus. It also makes the paper easier to stack, a welcome change for the professors who need to print dozens of syllabi.
There are a few problems for the new staplers to overcome. The first is that the printer in the mailroom can only staple five pages together. Standard staplers will still have to be used for extra-large essays. Another issue is that while the paper can hold itself together, the pressure that the printer exerts can weaken the paper itself, increasing its ability to tear. An often-used set of documents attached by a paper staple, such as a syllabus, may begin to tear. In addition, this form of staple is not as easy to remove as the metal staple. To separate pages, you will likely need to tear the paper apart.
Stapleless staples have existed for several decades but were not practical or efficient until 2009. They were not able to staple many pages together, could not hold, and were not economically feasible. In 2007 the Japanese company Kokuyo decided to change that. Wanting to produce a green alternative to the common staple, Kokuyo dedicated time and money to creating a product that could attach many pages and hold for a long time. According to their website, their efforts eventually resulted in the Harinacs in 2009.
Since then, stapleless staples have continued to be on the rise. All that is required is the simple touch of a button, and metal is replaced with paper.