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New way to save energy: Disappearing ink
Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com, April 30, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and parent company Xerox are experimenting with a type of paper and a complementary printer that would produce documents that fade away after 16 to 24 hours...
How does it work? The paper is coated with photosensitive chemicals that turn dark when hit with UV light.
Users don't have to wait for the paper to fade either. By running it through the special printer made for this paper, the printer will erase the old image before putting the new one on.
The paper and printer could hit the market in a few years.
The same sheets of paper can be run through the printer hundreds of time, according to tests conducted by Xerox, said Eric Shrader, area manager, energy systems, device hardware laboratory at PARC. Typically, the paper isn't reusable only when it gets damaged or crumpled.
The idea is to cut the amount of energy consumed in making paper and printing...
"Being able to reuse paper is a big energy win," Shrader said.
Energy has become a major focus of research at PARC over the last three years. The lab, which Xerox opened in the '70s, helped create the PC, inkjet printing, and Ethernet networking. Xerox, however, didn't commercialize a lot of these inventions successfully; instead, companies like Apple borrowed liberally from the lab to great effect. PARC now functions relatively independently, coming up with inventions to license to others.
Not every document is right for reusable paper...
"Think of the Google map you printed to get here," Shrader said. "Thirty years ago, we said the future was paperless."
The paper and the printer will be a little bit more expensive than their conventional counterparts. The photosensitive molecule embedded in the paper is proprietary.
While the paper shown in the photo is yellow with purple ink that appeared later, Xerox has produced white paper and can come up with a variety of ink colors. The company, however, has used yellow paper as an example so that focus groups know what sheets to reuse and which to recycle.
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