Uni-Ball Develops the First Paper Pen Refill
unsharpen.com
unsharpen.com
BTW I really like pens from this company. I remember living in Japan in the late 90s and wondering what stone age country I was from, where we didn't have such amazing writing products available from the quality stationers, let alone the shack of a corner store.
Uni makes the best normally-priced office-stationery pens I've ever given away as gifts, to this day. I used to get them sent free for blog reviews but unfortunately ran out of time for that. Still a happy customer.
About the article: this is really cool! One thing that I can't help thinking about though (not to be a negative Nancy) is the opacity of the barrel is probably going to make it much more difficult to tell when the ink is running out. To be clear, though, that's a secondary concern to the plastic reduction, which is amazing.
The ultimate combo with this would be affordable and durable third-party (or first-party) compatible pen bodies themselves. There are third-party metal pen bodies compatible with many of the popular pen refills that are sold, but last I checked they were so expensive that the economics didn't make any sense unless you really burn through the refills.
The final step would be for it to be compostable (eg. lined with something waxy).
> The ink storage pipe includes an at least two-layer structure of an inner layer in contact with ink and a base layer, the base layer being formed of a paper base material and the inner layer being formed of a resin. The resin is preferably an acrylic resin, polystyrene, a fluorine resin, silicone or a mixture thereof.
> In case of applying a resin film, the inner layer 4 has a thickness of typically 3 to 90 micrometre and preferably 5 to 60 micrometre.
This honestly seems like the coke cans (https://youtu.be/uQHFQoFoxvQ?t=25). In any case, this should be easier to recycle than the cans.