Printing giant Xerox has today launched a new line of "green" paper for digital printing, which uses half as many trees as traditional paper and also requires less water and fewer chemicals throughout the production process. However, critics have argued the paper is of a lower quality than traditional alternatives.

The new High Yield Business Paper is made by mechnically grinding wood into pulp, as opposed to using the chemical pulping processes traditionally used for paper for digital printing. As a result the process converts 90 percent of the wood into usable pulp, double the 45 percent yield from traditional processes.

Previously mechanical processes have been untenable for creating paper for digital printing because of operational problems, such as curling and dust, which makes the paper incompatible with digital print devices. But now Xerox claims it has overscome these problems.

Furthermore, the paper is being manufactured at a plant that uses hydroelectric power, which results in a 75 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions throughout the production process.

Xerox said the paper is also 10 percent lighter than alternatives, reducing shipping and distribution costs for firms that use the new paper. The company predicts this lighter weight will make the new product ideal for direct mail distributors, estimating that a printer who used a carton of the new paper to print and mail 1,000 5-sheet sets of a document would save $80 in mailing costs.

Merilyn Dunn, director at InfoTrends Communication Supplies Consulting Service welcomed the development, claiming it "opens up new application opportunities and cost savings to print providers using digital equipment".

Xerox predicts that the paper will be primarily used by print shops to "preprint offset shells for transactional documents like invoices, statements, and direct mail pieces, then use a digital press to add highlight color or personalised information, such as names and regional details, to draw attention to documents".

It also claimed that the softer shade of the paper – it boasts a brightness of 81 on a scale of 100 – makes reading easier, ensuring the paper is "ideal for short-run books, educational printing such as supplemental course books and worksheets, and temporary business documents, which do not need a long archival life".

However, a report in the Wall Street Journal said that the reason for the focus on documents that do not require a archiving is because the paper "yellows badly as it ages". It also claimed that the paper is not as white or as smooth as traditional alternatives, meaning customers would have to be willing to buy a "lower-quality" product in order to bolster their environmental concerns.

There are also concerns over Xerox's ability to scale up the new production process. The company said that the new paper is available to order in North America from today, but Robert Corbishley, European public relations manager for production systems at Xerox, said that "there are no plans to launch this product in Europe at the moment".

Posted by James Murray on August 1, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

IT manufacturer Toshiba has revealed it could introduce a new printer that uses plastic paper into the European market in the next few years as demand increases for more environmentally sustainable printing technologies.

The B-SX8R printer, which is aimed at business customers and could be used to support any process where documents do not need to be kept, was launched in Japan last year and promises to reduce firm's carbon emissions as well as their paper waste.

The company had held off introducing the product in Europe due to concerns that demand may be insufficient to justify redesigning the product to achieve compliance with the EU's Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. But Toshiba spokesman Mike Keane said recently that the company was currently in discussions with large European customers about the product and was increasingly confident that it would undertake a redesign and launch the model in Europe.

He added that a final decision would be made in the summer but said that he thought a European launch would now happen. "I think the interest is there for these types of systems and if we get the right feedback from customers we'll definitely do it," he said. "The amount of interest in environmental issues means that companies that ignore systems like this will look worse."
 
The plastic paper – which Toshiba claims can be used up to 500 times - is made from polyethylene terephthalate or PET that is then layered with heat sensitive chemical pigments that can be turned black or white under certain conditions. Altering the temperatures and cooling times applied to the paper produces or erases text and graphics with the printer capable of producing up to 12 pages a minute.

Toshiba said that this approach allows firms to slash the amount of waste paper they generate, adding that the temperature based printing process means that the B-SX8R generates also accounts for just 1.5kg of CO2 emissions during the production process, compared to around 6.5kg from laser printers.

Cost savings could also result from the technology, according to Keane. "The paper costs about £5 a sheet, so we've calculated that if you are printing 200 sheets a day you wouldn't save money though there would be environmental savings," he said. "If you print 300 to 350 sheets a day you'd have both financial and environmental savings."

However, Keane warned that European companies interested in the technology would have to be careful to ensure the printer was used for the right purposes.

"In Japan, the B-SX8R is proving popular because people have no concerns with handling the paper and then returning it back into the system," he explained. "We need to ensure similar processes are in place at European customers so that the paper isn't thrown out."

Toshiba predicts closed loop processes where the document is returned after it has been used, such as manufacturing quality checks or delivery checklists, are the most likely applications for the printer.

Keane added that it would still be some time before reusable paper printers appear in European offices. "We have a similar system to the B-SX8R in Japan called eBlue where you heat up the paper and it is cleaned," he said. "It can be reused up to five times, but outside Japan we decided it wouldn't work as too many people just wouldn't return the paper to be reused."

However, he predicted that environmental concerns would eventually drive greater adoption of these new technologies, regardless of Europeans' traditionally profligacy. "Japanese businesses have always had well-defined flow systems for paperwork," he said. "But these processes are becoming more pronounced in Europe and I think the culture is now more susceptible to these technologies."

Posted by James Murray on May 22, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Printer manufacturer Ricoh yesterday joined the growing ranks of IT vendors providing schemes to offset the carbon emitted operating their equipment by donating towards a fruit tree planting project in Africa on behalf of its customers.

Under the new scheme firms buying Ricoh printing equipment can sign up to have their printer and copier usage monitored, then for every 100,000 photocopies or prints produced a tree is planted.

Chas Moloney, associate director of marketing at Ricoh, said that the company's calculations meant that this meant the emissions generated operating the machine would be offset. "100,000 prints may sound like a lot but we overestimated the emissions in the calculations to ensure that we can say with confidence that the scheme covers the emissions generated," he said.

Customers will then receive green, bronze, silver, gold or platinum e-certificates based on the number of trees planted on their behalf.

The scheme, which is operated by charity Seeds for Africa, also has social and economic benefits according to Ricoh as the fruit trees are planted near schools in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda and form part of a wider programme to educate young people in sustainable agricultural practices.

Moloney said the move marked a step forward in the company's environmental and CSR efforts. "In the past we have donated to tree schemes where the cash has gone towards tending to trees, but this takes it to the next level and ensures trees that wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t put the money in are planted," he claimed. 

The scheme is likely to be welcomed by green minded customers, but should receive a more mixed response from environmentalists who will argue that offsetting printing is still significantly less beneficial than avoiding printing in the first place.

However, Moloney insisted Ricoh was committed to limiting customers' environmental impact, arguing that while the paper-less office remained impractical for many firms the company's printers were configured to help reduce paper use. "All our printers have duplex [double sided printing] as their default mode and we have also invested heavily in R&D to limit the environmental impact of our production process and enhance the energy efficiency of our products," he said.

The news came as a new report from the Centre for Economic Business Research (CEBR) claimed that UK organisations waste £1bn a year on printing through a combination of poor print management processes and ill-conceived print outsourcing contracts. The report, which was commissioned by OKI Printing Solutions, argued that millions of pounds, not to mention swathes of trees, could be saved by organisations simply improving the organisation of their printing processes.

Posted by James Murray on January 31, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

UK offices will waste enough energy to roast 4.4 million turkeys over the Christmas period due to employees' failure to turn off unused office equipment over the festive break.

That is according to research last week from printer giant Canon which estimates that the UK workforce's well documented love of always-on electrical equipment means that 43.6m KwH of electricity will be wasted between Friday 22nd of December and the second of January, when most UK offices will either re-open or return to normal staffing levels following the Christmas break.

That represents enough energy to microwave 268m mince pies or power 350,000 tree lights for the whole period - meaning that £8.66m will be wasted in electricity bills and almost 19,000 tonnes of CO2 will be unnecessarily emitted.

David Smith, marketing director of Canon Business Solutions, insisted that the headline-grabbing research had relied on a robust methodology.

He claimed Canon had calculated the figures by using total UK office equipment data from the National Energy Foundation and market research firm Infosource and turn off rates gained from a Canon survey of 100 firms – which found that half of PCs, 60 percent of printers and 100 percent of faxes will be left on over the Christmas period. It then used figures from the Carbon Trust on the typical energy consumption of office equipment to work out how much electricity would be wasted.

Smith said that equating the amount of electricity wasted with the number of Turkey's that could be cooked using that energy was an effective way of highlighting the scale of the problem. "We've used this tactic in the past where we've shown customers that upgrading from an old printer to one of our new multi-functional devices will save enough energy in a year to microwave 17,500 chickens," he said. "It is a very effective analogy for getting the message across."

Smith added that it was hardly surprising that so many PCs and printers will be left on over the Christmas period. "At Christmas people's minds are on getting out of the office," he said. "Also many people think they have switched off machines when they have just logged off or put them on stand-by."

But Smith insisted there were real benefits for firms in encouraging staff to turn off PCs and monitors, power down all office peripherals, turn off lights, and, in the longer term, upgrade to more energy efficient technologies.

"For most businesses there are big cost savings to be realised," he said. "But beyond that, green issues are being driven up the corporate agenda and if you don’t show that you are making practical moves to reduce energy consumption you are going to lose competitiveness, particularly in government contracts."

And with that warning ringing in its ears GBN is about to turn off its PCs and printers and head home to cook its own Christmas turkey.

Hope you have an enjoyable festive season and a happy New Year, and we'll be back in the New Year with plenty more green business stories.

Posted by James Murray on December 21, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

In all the recent upsurge of interest in green computing we seem to have slightly forgotten one of the most direct environmental impacts of IT: the handling and disposal of our electronic waste products.

That’s probably because of the huge paper tiger of the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive. We say paper tiger, as despite a lot of awareness raising in the last three years about the upcoming responsibility for end of life computers and the like, there is as yet no actual legal obligations on suppliers or users to do anything. This is ultimately because, for various Whitehall reasons, the UK has lagged our European trading partners in implementing the thing.

But WEEE hasn’t gone away, nor has its cousin the RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) Directive, which went live in July here as well as Europe. And at least some organisations have already had to face up to the implications.

Take business and industrial printer supplier Zebra Technologies, which supplies bar coding and other special printers to clients like Tesco, DHL and TNT. Its commitment to meeting both standards isn’t going to be every company’s issue by a long chalk - but it’s still interesting to see how the organisation has had to change to meet this green challenge.

Zebra has had to retool its old style printers and new, compliant ones across its entire range, from high performance industrial label printers to compact and lightweight portable printers and on-demand plastic card printers. Zebra has sold over five million products, incidentally.

“WEEE and RoHS have made a major impact on us,” notes Richard Hughes-Rowland, Zebra’s European product manager. Zebra decided to get WEEE compliant despite it not being a UK standard yet, which meant looking at each variant of its main 30 product lines “down to the single printer board level”. “This has been a significant undertaking for us, and all in all will cost us let’s say a seven figure amount of engineering effort.”

Has this work been welcomed by users yet? “There is some awareness certainly out there that there are these directives and customers are just now starting to want to take products that meet them and so don’t leave them with any legal obligations,” he confirms.

Expect much more such awareness when we finally do get WEEE.

See here for a full update on Zebra’s compliance work to get a feel for how much has been involved.

Posted by Gary Flood on November 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)