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Of the 1,200 pages the average office worker prints per month, 21 per cent of it ends up in the recycling bin on the same day it's printed, according to Brinda Dalal, an anthropologist at office-favourite Xerox. So what cunning solution has the company come up with? Disappearing ink. It may sound like an implausible plot from a spy film, but researchers have actually developed an office copier/printer system where text on printed documents simply vanishes after 16 hours, allowing the paper to be reused.
The paper-based "transient" document system, developed by Xerox's researchers at Palo Alto and Xerox Research Centre of Canada labs, is an attractive concept, environmentally speaking. It uses no toner or special eraser technology, just chemically coated paper that costs little more than ordinary printer paper. So with 30 to 100 re-uses per sheet, the savings could be huge.
Printer paper is not only increasingly expensive to buy, but it uses up natural resources and energy for manufacturing and recycling. This year alone, about 2.5 trillion pages will be printed worldwide. That's a lot of paper and a lot of forest. According to Dalal, almost half of what is printed or copied in most offices is for daily, transient use -- for meetings or for reading away from the computer.
"Despite our reliance on computers to share and process information, there is still a strong dependence on the printed page for reading and absorbing content," says Paul Smith, manager of Xerox Canada Research Centre's new materials design and synthesis lab. "Of course, we'd all like to use less paper, but we know from talking with customers that many people still prefer to work with information on paper. Self-erasing documents for short-term use offers the best of both worlds."
It may be a while before you see mysterious piles of blank documents in your office, though. It seems Xerox is still looking for a market for its transient paper technology -- and it is emphatic that it has yet to make a decision as to whether it will become a commercial product.
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