Is it eco friendly to write with a fountain pen? Perhaps that would be to stretch the concept — it might after all be more eco friendly to not write at all. But because it’s reusable by nature, the fountain pen is a lot more eco friendly than, for instance, disposable plastic pens. (This is particularly true if you don’t use ink cartridges but instead you have a converter in the pen, which makes it possible to refill the pen with ink from ink bottles. All the ink bottles I have seen for sale are, by the way, made from glass, so there’s another eco friendlier element.)
“But disposable pens are so much cheaper,” you might argue.
That depends on your definition of cheap. If, by cheap, you mean you have to pay very little money up front in order to posses the pen, then yes, disposable pens are cheaper. But if we include in the calculation the cost to future generations of us producing and throwing away plastic waste which will fill up and spoil our nature, then no, disposable pens are certainly not cheaper. In fact we (and our children and their children, too) will keep paying and paying again the expense for that “cheap” pen, long after you are gone.
So maybe consider a fountain pen. Not all of them are expensive, and some of the inexpensive ones are fantastically fine pens. Still, I suggest you buy one that strikes you as perhaps a little too costly for you and your budget, because then you will respect that pen more and you will take better care of it and consequently it will last longer — and the longer it lasts the better for the environment and the better for all of us.
Today I flushed out my own fountain pen, and as always I found it to be a remarkably rewarding procedure. Engineering and intellectual striving combines gracefully in this one object, which is small enough to fit in my pocket. And when I clean and maintain it I humbly play supporting act: I’m responsibly part of civilization, then. I’m history, past and future.