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erasable toner
Print, erase, print, erase,
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Another paper-saving product yet to see
the light of day is Xerox’s erasable paper.
Xerox has taken a different tack to Toshiba
and the University of Cambridge, by
developing re-usable paper that erases itself
after a certain period of time. Suitable for
‘daily use’ documents printed for a single
viewing, which Xerox says account for
two out of every five pages printed in the
office, erasable paper uses compounds that
change colour when they absorb a certain
wavelength of light and then gradually
disappear. The version unveiled by Xerox in
2008 self-erases after 16-24 hours.
When it comes to printing, office
workers have taken the ‘reduce, reuse,
recycle’ mantra to heart, often for
financial rather than environmental
reasons.
According to the Kyocera Mita
Environmental Survey 2011, the average
number of pages printed by an office worker
fell by 40% between 2010 and 2011, from
10,000 pages a year to 6,000. Meanwhile
organisations continue to recycle their waste
paper: the recycling rate in Western Europe is
now 70% and must be nearing its ceiling.
The area where office workers have been
less successful is paper ‘re-use’. Yes, you can
make litter for guinea pigs or turn waste
paper into notepads (harder to do now that
people print on both sides of the page), but
this hardly qualifies as productive re-use.
What’s needed is a way to erase pages so
that they can be printed again and again.
Printer manufacturers have been working
on this concept for 15 years or more without
success. Until last month, when Toshiba
unveiled an erasable toner system to be
launched in the winter of 2012/13. A video
report by Digitized Information Inc. (www.
diginfo.tv) shows the system in action, from
which it is possible to draw the following
conclusions:
n
The system requires specially developed
erasable toner and a purpose-built MFP,
but works with normal copier paper.
n
Erasable toner is currently only available
in blue, but Toshiba plans to launch other
colours in the future, as well as a colour
version of the MFP.
n
Toner is erased using heat, which also
removes notes made with a Pilot Frixion
erasable pen. Other ink and pencil marks
are not removed.
n
A sheet can be erased five times.
n
The process de-colours the toner, rather
than erasing it completely. Because a
ghost of the original text can remain, the
system isn’t suitable for sensitive material.
n
The erasing unit is currently a separate
unit, but the plan is to integrate it fully into
the MFP.
n
A scanner within the erasing unit digitises
and archives pages before they are erased.
n
Erased pages are automatically sorted into
those that can be re-used and those with
pen marks that will need to be recycled.
This is an exciting development, but there
are still questions around pricing, energy
consumption and the practicality of such a
system in an office environment that Toshiba
will need to address if its solution is to
become an office staple. There is also the
risk that alternative systems could make it
redundant.
Laser removal
New research from the University of
Cambridge, also released last month, proves
it is possible to remove normal HP LaserJet
toner from Canon copier paper without
damaging it in any way.
The purpose of the study led by Dr
Julian Allwood, Leader of the Low Carbon
Materials Processing Group at the University,
was to see if there was an energy-efficient
alternative to recycling for paper re-use. After
considering options for removing, obscuring
or decolouring text, his team focused on
applications of laser technology. “Initial
tests showed that we could heat toner to
the point where it vaporises, but that doing
so aged the paper leaving a perfect yellow
print of the line removed,” explained
Dr Allwood.
However, further trials found that
in certain combinations toner could be
vaporised without damaging or marking the
paper, potentially allowing a sheet to be re-
used five times. Particles from the vaporised
toner are filtered so that the surrounding
air stays clean.
The study found that toner removal and
paper re-use eliminated four steps from the
paper production cycle – forestry, pulping,
paper making and disposal by incineration
or landfill – resulting in a 95% reduction in
emissions compared to the production of
one tonne of office paper. Recycling has a
76% reduction in emissions.
Dr Allwood told
PrintIT
that when
economies of scale are taken into
account the advantages over recycling
could be even greater. “We were using
a developmental laser not designed for
efficiency. We’ve made an estimate that
this could save half the emissions created
by recycling paper, but that depends on a
raft of elements,” he said.
Dr Allwood’s concept is not as
advanced as Toshiba’s – he is currently
looking for a manufacturer to create a
prototype – but it does have one big
advantage: it works with the most widely
used toner and standard paper. “If you lock
the user into a specific paper or toner, you
make life easier for yourself. But that limits
the supply of material you can feed in. Our
hope was to generalise this to all paper
and toner,” he said.
Could 2013 be the year of erasable toner?
James Goulding reports
Going,
going,
gone?
One of only
two working
prototypes of
Toshiba’s toner
eraser seen in
action at News
International’s
London offices.
Used paper
goes in the top
and clean paper
comes out
the bottom.