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Restoring prairie in his free time, Fritz James loves the outdoors and loves to bring his passion into the workplace. Having bought the family business in 1982, James has done everything to bring the wholeness of the environment into the products he creates. That’s why James has decided to go beyond his already-successful company, Corporate Image, and launch a new company called Naked Binders.

“We’re taking our skills as book binders and book manufacturers and applying them to (eco-friendly) binders,” James said.

Corporate Image produces custom presentation materials, such as marketing kits and handbooks, for companies across the United States. Using state-of-the-art printing facilities at its Des Moines location, Corporate Image has mastered the art of making everyday binders into presentation masterpieces.

But as James’ love for the environment intensified, so did his vision of expanding the product line to incorporate more eco-friendly products. That’s when James gathered together a small team of six people and decided to launch Naked Binders.

“This little team started and we developed a series of binders, enclosures and really neat products that we could sell all over the United States,” James said. “We worked on it and we designed them to be environmentally correct, and all these things are just as green as you could get.”

The naked binder is a three-ring metal binder that is made out of 100 percent post-consumer waste from Connecticut and is 100 percent bio-renewable. “It’s newspaper, old boxes and all the stuff you throw away and put neatly in that green container,” James said. “It’s 100 percent curbside pickup from the state of Connecticut.”

To make the binder even more environmentally friendly, James designed it so that the actual recycling process would be easy. He explained that once the binder is ready to be recycled, the rivets can simply be popped out with a screwdriver and the metal portion can be recycled with other metal products, while the binder portion can be put in with paper recyclables. “It’s a product that doesn’t do any harm, and it’s a product that takes away things that do harm,” James said.

Despite the harm to the environment, many corporations are still using vinyl binders because of the cheap costs. James explained that “people may pay a little more for a binder like this, but it lasts six times longer than any binder they ever had.”

The durability is due to the flex hinge that some of the naked binders offer. The flex hinge distributes the force of the bend over 8 different pivots, allowing for over 50,000 open, and closes, James explained.

Furthermore, “vinyl is toxic,” he said. “It’s toxic to the environment inside the room and when you try to burn it or incinerate it, you can’t. Try to bury it in a landfill and it lasts forever.”

This toxicity of vinyl and plastic is one of the motivators behind the launch of Naked Binders and its pursuit of eco-friendly products. “None of our products have any plastic,” James said. “We do use a polyester film over some, but it’s inert and no gases are given off.”

But even the inert film doesn’t satisfy James’ passion for eco-friendly products. Naked Binders is testing corn-based films that could be used to replace the polyester that it is using now.

“We’re working on a corn-based film that disintegrates after you put it in the landfill,” James said. “The films are hooked together by starch molecules. It’s renewable and it has nothing to do with plastic.”

James has also produced a variety of different binder types to choose from, specifically targeting three markets: the home office, corporate offices and students. “This is a product that we are very, very proud of, and we really believe that it has an application in home offices, big corporate offices, to students and everybody,” he said.

The home office binders are brightly color-coded to allow for easy differentiation and sorting. The corporate binders have a clean, square appearance, that come in subdued corporate colors and can be embossed, branded or labeled; and the student binders are bare, with nothing on them. In addition to the subdued corporate colors, businesses can also special-order specific colors to match company color schemes.

Naked Binders will operate online and take all orders via the Web. James said orders that include logo embossing or other special requests will take approximately 10 days to be filled, while smaller, more personal orders that don’t include special requests will be next-day delivery. “We expect to sell millions of these things to people,” James said. Naked Binders hopes to launch its own Web site, www.nakedbinders.com, and start taking orders within the next 60-days. “To make something simply and really, honestly environmental – it takes a lot of work,” James said.