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The Future Of...Paper

It's a possible fix for the reams and reams of paper that are printed, used briefly, and then tossed every day. BNET correspondent Sumi Das takes us inside the Palo Alto Research Center where scientists are developing a way to print an image that disappears, allowing the paper to be used dozens of times.

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Tags: Xerox PARC, Ream, Future of, paper, green, parc, xerox, office, print, printer

 
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  •  
    1

    melvin35

    02/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    Wonder is the media is as biodegradable or recyclable as paper?

  •  
    2

    drhssai@...

    02/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    An excellent brief of reusable paper. If atleast 10% of the viewers adapt this millions od dollars can be saved.

    Dr H S Sai,Sr Professor(IT),India

  •  
    3

    17204

    02/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    ... and the death of history.

    Along this path we'll have no paper trail of where we were and what caused the events of today and tomorrow.



  •  
    4

    17204

    02/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    ... and the death of history.

    Along this path we'll have no paper trail indicating where we were. Without knowing that, we can't understand where we are now -- or where we're headed.
    Without unchangeable records, we become primitive -- nothing more than muscle and bone, just human fodder for tyrants.

    -- Powers, Bare/Foot/Gear Corporation.

  •  
    5

    greggah

    02/06/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    I don't think it will replace paper entirely. What it could be used for would the kinds of documents we aren't going to keep or don't need to keep around.
    Also keep in mind that we are supposed to be diving vehicles that fly according to our ancestors. Then again this could go the way of the beta video recorder. What generally sounds like a good idea sometimes doesn't end up being a profitable one.

  •  
    6

    livethakly

    02/06/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    They are talking about your standard daily 'workplace' usages of paper, not records and other true historical information. Let's not overreact.

    Most companies print out way more than need be printed and how much paper each and every day gets thrown away after mis-prints due to computer settings and the like. This would solve all of that. Of course as is most typical of many companies, this would be a hard sell, as Im sure short term it would cost more - long term (on ink alone) it would more than make up for it, but most companies I've known are not so worried about the long term when it comes to 'operations'.

  •  
    7

    belfox

    02/10/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    Very nice idea from PARC (as so many times in the past; mouse, GUI, networking protocols, etc.) They should licence it out to a real good marketing company, or even to their competitors to gain critical mass for the production of the media.

    1 fun caveat: some idiot will use a pen or marker to highlight something of interest on the page, and it wil need to be replaced.

  •  
    8

    ygourven

    02/17/09 | Report as spam

    RE: The Future Of...Paper

    agree with Belfox. PARC invented almost everything in
    computers and even new concepts which still have to happen
    (like "ubiquitous computing" invented in the 1970's by Mark
    Weiser) but this time it seems that they have found
    something more relevant to their core business and that they
    might be able to make more use of it.

    As the PARC rep says however,it's not meant to replace paper
    but the "1/4 to 1/3 of paper which gets thrown away the day
    it was printed out".

    And in fact, it's not even that much. It won't apply for
    annotations, true, and you won't be able to take it outside
    either, and possibly you won't print out the entire slide
    deck for that exec committee either for fear of handing them
    a bunch of blank yellow pages.

    At the end of the day, it might be able to replace 10-15% of
    the paper used in the office. Very good indeed but not quite
    the future of paper ... yet.

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The Future Of...Paper

It's a possible fix for the reams and reams of paper that are printed, used briefly, and then tossed every day. BNET correspondent Sumi Das takes us inside the Palo Alto Research Center where scientists are developing a way to print an image that disappears, allowing the paper to be used dozens of times.

Sumi Das: Pound for pound workers in the U.S. use a lot of paper. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that the average American worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year.

Breaking the paper habit isn't easy. Many people prefer reading a printed page over a computer screen. But research shows that much of what we print isn't used for very long.

Eric Shrader: We found that between a quarter and a third of the paper that people print in the office gets thrown away the day they print it.

Sumi Das: Of course paper can be recycled, but only a handful of times, so the future of paper may look like this.

Eric Shrader: The paper itself changes color. There's no ink going on to the paper, there's no toner going out to the paper and then later over time that image fades and you can put that same piece of paper back into your printer and print a new image.

Sumi Das: Scientists at Xerox and the Palo Alto Research Center or PARC have invented paper that can be re-used dozens of times.

Eric Shrader: This paper contains especial coating that has a material and it get similar to the material in photogrey sunglasses, you know those sunglasses where you go outside they turn dark you come back inside they turn light. And how that material works is when a photon of light hits the molecule, the molecule opens up and it turns into the dark form and then overtime the molecule closes back up and turns into the clear form.

Sumi Das: This technology is completely ink-free. The image is formed using an array of light emitting diodes or LEDs in a unit attached to the printer. it means that businesses would no longer have to buy expensive toner.

Eric Shrader: The technology in the printer is really a high brightness LED, so the LED scans over the paper and turns on where you want the molecules to change to the dark state.

Sumi Das: The reusable paper is yellow to avoid mix-ups with documents printed on traditional paper. The technology has some limitations. It can't produce color images and workers will have to be cautious with reusable paper if they're outdoors. Exposure to the sun could ruin the image.

Eric Shrader: The things we still need to work on are the overall development of the printer architecture and making the image lifetime longer. Right now the image lifetime is about a day and we think a few days is probably a better fit to customer needs.

Sumi Das: By cutting back on paper consumption, companies not only help their bottom line, but also the environment.

Eric Shrader: Paper has a huge environmental impact. One piece of paper to make that piece of paper takes about the same amount of energy as running a 60-watt light bulb for an hour.

Sumi Das: The future of paper it may appear and disappear before your eyes. For BNET I'm Sumi Das.