How Green Printers Work

easy being green. I mean, we do live in the uh one century, the era of the paperless office, right, Yeah, you don't see paper any where. I'm still waiting for that paperless office. I don't know about you. Um. Before before my tenure here at How Stuff Works, I lived the life of a of a lowly worker in a

consulting firm and uh and I won't name names. I'm not going to name where I worked or anything like that, but I will say there were people who were notorious for uh having their assistance retrieve emails, print them to paper, and then hand them over, thus negating any use for

email whatsoever in my eyes. Actually, one of my big pet peeves is walking over to the printer and this has happened in many places I've worked, uh, walking over the printer, picking up my print job and looking down to see a stack of paper about the size of a pack of paper sitting there for old print jobs that people have never picked up. And I'm sure I probably have contributed to that stack from time to time.

But sure, Yeah, you send something to a group printer and then you get distracted, and then you forget that it's just sitting there, and then you realize you never really needed it in the first place. Exactly. So there's all there's a human element to to printing that obviously we could adjust to make things better, but that's not the only thing we can do to to help make

printing more environmentally friendly. In fact, there are a lot of manufacturers that are looking into various solutions to make printing have less of an impact on the environment, that's true. One of the leading UH manufacturers who are who are doing that at this point is Xerox. They actually have a number of different initiatives, not picking on on just Xerox or others, but um, it was just earlier this year that Cina did an article on something that Xerox

is doing some researchers in the Palo Alto Research Center. Um, you may or may not have heard of it, but they've done all kinds of amazing computing things over the past few decades. And uh one of the things they've come up with is reusable paper. Yeah, it's a really cool. This paper is coated with a photo sensitive chemical and um, what happens is the chemical turns dark when when it's

hit with UV light, um so ultra violet light. Uh. You see what essentially what we're talking about here is a printer that prints disappearing inc uh the right out. They're talking about between sixteen and twenty four hours. The ink would fade away, and you would come back to a sheet of paper that looks just like it did when you first put it into the printer. And you may say, well, what's what good is that? You know,

if you print something and it just goes away. Well, there are a lot of uses actually, I mean you wouldn't want to use it for legal documents. That would be a bad use, But a good use would be for let's say you have a restaurant and your restaurant does daily specials. Well, instead of wasting paper every day, printing out these daily specials. You could use the same paper to print out your daily special and then the

next day be ready to go and print again. And in fact, Xerox has a printer that, by design, uh will wipe a page clean of of its print and then print a new page directly on there. So you need the same piece of paper. You just run it through even if the ink has not faded yet. It baths the paper in ultra violet light at such an intensity that immediately wipes the page clean and then prints it anew so you you can keep using the same paper until essentially the paper wears out and it won't

feed through the printer anymore. So that's it's basically racing the paper, right, you know, like you would a magnetic storage device or something like exactly, Yeah, you can, uh, And it's making paper more like a more like an electronic document in a way, because you can just run it through a little machine and it clears it and gets it ready for the next pass, you know. I UH.

When we were doing research on this podcast, I found an article from the New York Times from November two thousand and six something obviously that that park has been working on for some time. UM and an anthropologist working for Park named Brenda del All said that people are

generally using paper in offices for display. What that means is what what that means is that essentially, rather than printing stuff off so that you can save a copy of that, you know, put it in your archives, put it in your files, and keep it, what people are using it for is for meeting. They're printing out presentations and other things that you would distribute it at meetings,

and once they're done, they are discarding them. And I think that's one of the things that one of the reasons that Park is working on something like this, because you could print print these things out on this reusable paper, distribute them for the meeting, and then when the meeting is over, instead of throwing in the recycle band and using the paper and the towner and the energy to print that UM, you can just turn back in to turn the sheets back in and have them reused later,

which is very very cool. Yeah, it's it's pretty and and like you mentioned, there are other companies that are looking into this kind of thing too. A few years ago, Toshiba came out with a device that UM and a printing method that uses a special kind of ink. It's actually got three components and that two of them give it a color and the third one removes the color

when heat is applied. So the idea is that you would run this paper through the printer, you print out, your documents comes out and kind of a bluish uh tent, which is that they actually called the ink e blue, and you can hand out the documents and everyone reads them. When they're done, they can hand them back to you, and then you would run them through a machine that's essentially a heater. You'd run it through and it would erase the ink from those pages, so you could use

the paper again. Same sort of concept with zerox, except instead of using ultraviolet light, you're using infrared radiation or otherwise known as heat um. But it's the same sort of idea, recycling paper so that you know you're not taking as big a toll on the environment, because that's that's one thing, you know, that's something that separates printers from other electronic devices like computers and and things like that.

You have the the energy requirement of the device itself that plays a factor, and how environmentally friendly or unfriendly it is if it's energy start enabled for example, or versus not enabled. But then you have the hardware version of it, you have the the toner you have, or ink you have the pay for, so you have things that make an environmental impact beyond just the energy needed

to run the device. That's true. UM. Other things that you may not be thinking about when you consider your printer are the amount of low level ozone that's pumped out. If you walk by the exhaust port on your UM printer, UM, and you don't drop a couple of proton torpedoes in it to blow it up, UM, you'll notice that there's it's what seems like hot air. Well, that's actually ozone UM. And you know it can actually be a pollutant at

low levels, you know. And you might say, well, hey, maybe my printer is helping fill that hole the ozone there, Well, it's not. It stays down here, you know where we are, and it's actually a low level pollutant. It's not good down here. It's good up there, but not down here. Right. And then you have the print cartridges if you have an ink jet printer there, they're plastic and they can be recycled. Actually, uh, tree Hugger, which is sort of a and and strange way a sister site to how

stuff works dot com. Tree Hugger had an article about toner cartridges being recycled into lumber or down cycling where you can actually press it into plastic furniture. Um, so at least you can do something with those. But there are other things to the ink and those, and the toner and laser printers is toxic. That stuff is actually dangerous.

So when you change the toner cartridge general laser printer, make sure you wash your hands afterwards, because that's actually dangerous, uh stuff, you don't want it to be exposed to it for a long time. And and the recycling goes the other way to HP printers are using inject cartridges that are made from recycled plastic bottles. So yeah, so you've got you've got it coming in going in that case. Um,

so yeah, there there are a lot of companies. You know, HP is actually leading in several areas as far as uh uh, the the environmentally friendly printing initiatives go. Um, they're also looking at discontinuing using and full chemicals when they're producing their printers, so uh, things like uh, PPC and everything that anything that could possibly have toxins in it. Because e waste is becoming a bigger problem too. What do you do with your electronics when they've lived out

their useful life and you've upgraded. You know, if you just dump it into the dump, there could be toxic chemicals that leach out, and and that's a whole new problem. So a lot of companies are looking into alternative ways of building their devices so that they don't have these harmful chemicals and metals to begin with, which is a you know, that's that's a good step in the right

direction too. And another thing that I discovered was this free software from green Print which highlights and removes blank pages from your documents. That's I wanted. I'm gonna have to sign up for the free the free trial immediately because I read about this. Not only does it not print blank pages, but it can hecked when you have a page that's just say, a header and a footer and there's nothing else there, so it's not totally blank, but it can detect that and not print that page

as well. And if any of you have ever printed a web page, like send a web page straight to print, you probably ended up with that final piece of paper that has nothing useful on it whatsoever. Green Print theoretically eliminates that, right that that's true. I have no idea what it would do for those manuals that have this page intentionally left blank on it, however, Right, Well, that's that's really for duplex printing anyway. So we're talking about

single side printing here, and that's true. If your printer supports duplex printing, which is printing on both sides, you're using one last piece of paper. Um. I we have a printer here in the office that I prefer to use because it prints on both sides of the paper. They're also other initiatives. Rico, another printer manufacturer from Japan, for a while in the was working on a system that would remove the towner from the paper and it

would work up to ten times. But apparently the company is no longer offering this, according to the article in the New York Times that I read, So I'm guessing that it didn't take off. Maybe it was ahead of its time. If it was in the people weren't as interested in conserving before the costs of energy were increasing. Um. But another thing that would would actually use its own

electricity to power it. Um in November for the anniversary cover of Esquire magazine, it's going to use e ink Electronic inc Um, which is essentially a series of plastic capsules that have die in them, and when a charge is applied to one side, it pulls the die to that side, and when it is pulled to the other the charges applied to the other side of the electronic paper, UH,

the die has pulled to that side. So in effect, what it does is it can you can actually change what it says in the paper depending on where the electric charge is applied. It's sort of like uh an electric TV one of the like an LCD screen where it has the different pixels and everything is you know, it's charge is applied for to a certain point on that screen for a certain uh to receive a certain color. Well, in this case, it's basically black or white or you know,

a color and white. UM. But it's going to allow Esquire to have words that scroll across the front of the magazine. The thing is, it's only going to work for a certain amount of time because in order to do that, it's got to keep a charge running to do that. Xerox has a printer that will print pages of This is called guricon or gyraicon um and it's

reusable paper. It works similarly basically the instead of having a ball where the ink moves from one side to the other, the balls are basically black and white, um, you know, on one side or the other, and they flip over depending on where the charge is applied. But basically in that situation, uh, you print it one time and it keeps that there doesn't have to continually have

a charge because it's the image is not changing. Um. But you could use the reusable pay prot do that too, and the electronic ink would give you the opportunity to have the same page and only use one page and have it change depending on what it is that you

need to display. Wow, that's pretty cool. And for you office managers out there who are kind of curious as to how much how much waste both environmental and just solid waste your printers are generating, Xerox has come up with a neat little tool for you called a sustainability calculator, And you just go to the to xerox is page and look for the sustainability calculator. What it does, is it?

It lets you put in a couple of points of input, mainly how fast your printers work, how many you have, um, how many images you print on average in a in a certain period of time, and then it calculates how much how much solid waste it produces, how many how many greenhouse gases it might produce, um, how much energy

it consumes. It can really help you see what your carbon foot print is as far as your printing side of operations go, and maybe make some changes if you if if things are looking kind of grim, you can maybe downsize the printers and make more have more of a centralized printing location, and that can help out a lot. Of course, the easiest way to uh, to minimize this waste and electronic or impact of electronic devices is to use them as minimally as possible. Don't print more than

you need to. And that's that basically comes down to you and me, right Yeah, like I said, putting the human element right back in there. Um. Yeah, the the these manufacturers are working really hard to make things as easy as possible for it to be green. Now it's up for us to carry it the rest of the way.

I guess we should probably wrap this up. We've talked about a lot of different subjects here, but if you want to learn more about just one in particular, I suggest reading how electronic ink works at how stuff works dot com. And we'll talk to you again really soon. Let us know what you think, send an email to podcast and how stuff works dot come. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you