Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot Com, brought to
Speaker 1: you by HP Live wirelessly, print Wirelessly. Hi there, my
Speaker 1: name is Chris Pollett. I'm an editor here at How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. Welcome to the podcast today. I have with
Speaker 1: me writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: how it's not easy being green, or it could be
Speaker 1: easy being green. I mean, we do live in the
Speaker 1: uh one century, the era of the paperless office, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't see paper any where. I'm still waiting for
Speaker 1: that paperless office. I don't know about you. Um. Before
Speaker 1: before my tenure here at How Stuff Works, I lived
Speaker 1: the life of a of a lowly worker in a
Speaker 1: consulting firm and uh and I won't name names. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to name where I worked or anything like that,
Speaker 1: but I will say there were people who were notorious
Speaker 1: for uh having their assistance retrieve emails, print them to paper,
Speaker 1: and then hand them over, thus negating any use for
Speaker 1: email whatsoever in my eyes. Actually, one of my big
Speaker 1: pet peeves is walking over to the printer and this
Speaker 1: has happened in many places I've worked, uh, walking over
Speaker 1: the printer, picking up my print job and looking down
Speaker 1: to see a stack of paper about the size of
Speaker 1: a pack of paper sitting there for old print jobs
Speaker 1: that people have never picked up. And I'm sure I
Speaker 1: probably have contributed to that stack from time to time.
Speaker 1: But sure, Yeah, you send something to a group printer
Speaker 1: and then you get distracted, and then you forget that
Speaker 1: it's just sitting there, and then you realize you never
Speaker 1: really needed it in the first place. Exactly. So there's
Speaker 1: all there's a human element to to printing that obviously
Speaker 1: we could adjust to make things better, but that's not
Speaker 1: the only thing we can do to to help make
Speaker 1: printing more environmentally friendly. In fact, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of manufacturers that are looking into various solutions to make
Speaker 1: printing have less of an impact on the environment, that's true.
Speaker 1: One of the leading UH manufacturers who are who are
Speaker 1: doing that at this point is Xerox. They actually have
Speaker 1: a number of different initiatives, not picking on on just
Speaker 1: Xerox or others, but um, it was just earlier this
Speaker 1: year that Cina did an article on something that Xerox
Speaker 1: is doing some researchers in the Palo Alto Research Center. Um,
Speaker 1: you may or may not have heard of it, but
Speaker 1: they've done all kinds of amazing computing things over the
Speaker 1: past few decades. And uh one of the things they've
Speaker 1: come up with is reusable paper. Yeah, it's a really cool.
Speaker 1: This paper is coated with a photo sensitive chemical and um,
Speaker 1: what happens is the chemical turns dark when when it's
Speaker 1: hit with UV light, um so ultra violet light. Uh.
Speaker 1: You see what essentially what we're talking about here is
Speaker 1: a printer that prints disappearing inc uh the right out.
Speaker 1: They're talking about between sixteen and twenty four hours. The
Speaker 1: ink would fade away, and you would come back to
Speaker 1: a sheet of paper that looks just like it did
Speaker 1: when you first put it into the printer. And you
Speaker 1: may say, well, what's what good is that? You know,
Speaker 1: if you print something and it just goes away. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of uses actually, I mean you
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to use it for legal documents. That would
Speaker 1: be a bad use, But a good use would be
Speaker 1: for let's say you have a restaurant and your restaurant
Speaker 1: does daily specials. Well, instead of wasting paper every day,
Speaker 1: printing out these daily specials. You could use the same
Speaker 1: paper to print out your daily special and then the
Speaker 1: next day be ready to go and print again. And
Speaker 1: in fact, Xerox has a printer that, by design, uh
Speaker 1: will wipe a page clean of of its print and
Speaker 1: then print a new page directly on there. So you
Speaker 1: need the same piece of paper. You just run it
Speaker 1: through even if the ink has not faded yet. It
Speaker 1: baths the paper in ultra violet light at such an
Speaker 1: intensity that immediately wipes the page clean and then prints
Speaker 1: it anew so you you can keep using the same
Speaker 1: paper until essentially the paper wears out and it won't
Speaker 1: feed through the printer anymore. So that's it's basically racing
Speaker 1: the paper, right, you know, like you would a magnetic
Speaker 1: storage device or something like exactly, Yeah, you can, uh,
Speaker 1: And it's making paper more like a more like an
Speaker 1: electronic document in a way, because you can just run
Speaker 1: it through a little machine and it clears it and
Speaker 1: gets it ready for the next pass, you know. I UH.
Speaker 1: When we were doing research on this podcast, I found
Speaker 1: an article from the New York Times from November two
Speaker 1: thousand and six something obviously that that park has been
Speaker 1: working on for some time. UM and an anthropologist working
Speaker 1: for Park named Brenda del All said that people are
Speaker 1: generally using paper in offices for display. What that means
Speaker 1: is what what that means is that essentially, rather than
Speaker 1: printing stuff off so that you can save a copy
Speaker 1: of that, you know, put it in your archives, put
Speaker 1: it in your files, and keep it, what people are
Speaker 1: using it for is for meeting. They're printing out presentations
Speaker 1: and other things that you would distribute it at meetings,
Speaker 1: and once they're done, they are discarding them. And I
Speaker 1: think that's one of the things that one of the
Speaker 1: reasons that Park is working on something like this, because
Speaker 1: you could print print these things out on this reusable paper,
Speaker 1: distribute them for the meeting, and then when the meeting
Speaker 1: is over, instead of throwing in the recycle band and
Speaker 1: using the paper and the towner and the energy to
Speaker 1: print that UM, you can just turn back in to
Speaker 1: turn the sheets back in and have them reused later,
Speaker 1: which is very very cool. Yeah, it's it's pretty and
Speaker 1: and like you mentioned, there are other companies that are
Speaker 1: looking into this kind of thing too. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: Toshiba came out with a device that UM and a
Speaker 1: printing method that uses a special kind of ink. It's
Speaker 1: actually got three components and that two of them give
Speaker 1: it a color and the third one removes the color
Speaker 1: when heat is applied. So the idea is that you
Speaker 1: would run this paper through the printer, you print out,
Speaker 1: your documents comes out and kind of a bluish uh tent,
Speaker 1: which is that they actually called the ink e blue,
Speaker 1: and you can hand out the documents and everyone reads them.
Speaker 1: When they're done, they can hand them back to you,
Speaker 1: and then you would run them through a machine that's
Speaker 1: essentially a heater. You'd run it through and it would
Speaker 1: erase the ink from those pages, so you could use
Speaker 1: the paper again. Same sort of concept with zerox, except
Speaker 1: instead of using ultraviolet light, you're using infrared radiation or
Speaker 1: otherwise known as heat um. But it's the same sort
Speaker 1: of idea, recycling paper so that you know you're not
Speaker 1: taking as big a toll on the environment, because that's
Speaker 1: that's one thing, you know, that's something that separates printers
Speaker 1: from other electronic devices like computers and and things like that.
Speaker 1: You have the the energy requirement of the device itself
Speaker 1: that plays a factor, and how environmentally friendly or unfriendly
Speaker 1: it is if it's energy start enabled for example, or
Speaker 1: versus not enabled. But then you have the hardware version
Speaker 1: of it, you have the the toner you have, or
Speaker 1: ink you have the pay for, so you have things
Speaker 1: that make an environmental impact beyond just the energy needed
Speaker 1: to run the device. That's true. UM. Other things that
Speaker 1: you may not be thinking about when you consider your
Speaker 1: printer are the amount of low level ozone that's pumped out.
Speaker 1: If you walk by the exhaust port on your UM printer, UM,
Speaker 1: and you don't drop a couple of proton torpedoes in
Speaker 1: it to blow it up, UM, you'll notice that there's
Speaker 1: it's what seems like hot air. Well, that's actually ozone UM.
Speaker 1: And you know it can actually be a pollutant at
Speaker 1: low levels, you know. And you might say, well, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe my printer is helping fill that hole the ozone there, Well,
Speaker 1: it's not. It stays down here, you know where we are,
Speaker 1: and it's actually a low level pollutant. It's not good
Speaker 1: down here. It's good up there, but not down here. Right.
Speaker 1: And then you have the print cartridges if you have
Speaker 1: an ink jet printer there, they're plastic and they can
Speaker 1: be recycled. Actually, uh, tree Hugger, which is sort of
Speaker 1: a and and strange way a sister site to how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Tree Hugger had an article about
Speaker 1: toner cartridges being recycled into lumber or down cycling where
Speaker 1: you can actually press it into plastic furniture. Um, so
Speaker 1: at least you can do something with those. But there
Speaker 1: are other things to the ink and those, and the
Speaker 1: toner and laser printers is toxic. That stuff is actually dangerous.
Speaker 1: So when you change the toner cartridge general laser printer,
Speaker 1: make sure you wash your hands afterwards, because that's actually dangerous,
Speaker 1: uh stuff, you don't want it to be exposed to
Speaker 1: it for a long time. And and the recycling goes
Speaker 1: the other way to HP printers are using inject cartridges
Speaker 1: that are made from recycled plastic bottles. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: you've got you've got it coming in going in that case. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, there there are a lot of companies. You know,
Speaker 1: HP is actually leading in several areas as far as
Speaker 1: uh uh, the the environmentally friendly printing initiatives go. Um,
Speaker 1: they're also looking at discontinuing using and full chemicals when
Speaker 1: they're producing their printers, so uh, things like uh, PPC
Speaker 1: and everything that anything that could possibly have toxins in it.
Speaker 1: Because e waste is becoming a bigger problem too. What
Speaker 1: do you do with your electronics when they've lived out
Speaker 1: their useful life and you've upgraded. You know, if you
Speaker 1: just dump it into the dump, there could be toxic
Speaker 1: chemicals that leach out, and and that's a whole new problem.
Speaker 1: So a lot of companies are looking into alternative ways
Speaker 1: of building their devices so that they don't have these
Speaker 1: harmful chemicals and metals to begin with, which is a
Speaker 1: you know, that's that's a good step in the right
Speaker 1: direction too. And another thing that I discovered was this
Speaker 1: free software from green Print which highlights and removes blank
Speaker 1: pages from your documents. That's I wanted. I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to sign up for the free the free trial immediately
Speaker 1: because I read about this. Not only does it not
Speaker 1: print blank pages, but it can hecked when you have
Speaker 1: a page that's just say, a header and a footer
Speaker 1: and there's nothing else there, so it's not totally blank,
Speaker 1: but it can detect that and not print that page
Speaker 1: as well. And if any of you have ever printed
Speaker 1: a web page, like send a web page straight to print,
Speaker 1: you probably ended up with that final piece of paper
Speaker 1: that has nothing useful on it whatsoever. Green Print theoretically
Speaker 1: eliminates that, right that that's true. I have no idea
Speaker 1: what it would do for those manuals that have this
Speaker 1: page intentionally left blank on it, however, Right, Well, that's
Speaker 1: that's really for duplex printing anyway. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: single side printing here, and that's true. If your printer
Speaker 1: supports duplex printing, which is printing on both sides, you're
Speaker 1: using one last piece of paper. Um. I we have
Speaker 1: a printer here in the office that I prefer to
Speaker 1: use because it prints on both sides of the paper.
Speaker 1: They're also other initiatives. Rico, another printer manufacturer from Japan,
Speaker 1: for a while in the was working on a system
Speaker 1: that would remove the towner from the paper and it
Speaker 1: would work up to ten times. But apparently the company
Speaker 1: is no longer offering this, according to the article in
Speaker 1: the New York Times that I read, So I'm guessing
Speaker 1: that it didn't take off. Maybe it was ahead of
Speaker 1: its time. If it was in the people weren't as
Speaker 1: interested in conserving before the costs of energy were increasing. Um.
Speaker 1: But another thing that would would actually use its own
Speaker 1: electricity to power it. Um in November for the anniversary
Speaker 1: cover of Esquire magazine, it's going to use e ink
Speaker 1: Electronic inc Um, which is essentially a series of plastic
Speaker 1: capsules that have die in them, and when a charge
Speaker 1: is applied to one side, it pulls the die to
Speaker 1: that side, and when it is pulled to the other
Speaker 1: the charges applied to the other side of the electronic paper, UH,
Speaker 1: the die has pulled to that side. So in effect,
Speaker 1: what it does is it can you can actually change
Speaker 1: what it says in the paper depending on where the
Speaker 1: electric charge is applied. It's sort of like uh an
Speaker 1: electric TV one of the like an LCD screen where
Speaker 1: it has the different pixels and everything is you know,
Speaker 1: it's charge is applied for to a certain point on
Speaker 1: that screen for a certain uh to receive a certain color. Well,
Speaker 1: in this case, it's basically black or white or you know,
Speaker 1: a color and white. UM. But it's going to allow
Speaker 1: Esquire to have words that scroll across the front of
Speaker 1: the magazine. The thing is, it's only going to work
Speaker 1: for a certain amount of time because in order to
Speaker 1: do that, it's got to keep a charge running to
Speaker 1: do that. Xerox has a printer that will print pages
Speaker 1: of This is called guricon or gyraicon um and it's
Speaker 1: reusable paper. It works similarly basically the instead of having
Speaker 1: a ball where the ink moves from one side to
Speaker 1: the other, the balls are basically black and white, um,
Speaker 1: you know, on one side or the other, and they
Speaker 1: flip over depending on where the charge is applied. But
Speaker 1: basically in that situation, uh, you print it one time
Speaker 1: and it keeps that there doesn't have to continually have
Speaker 1: a charge because it's the image is not changing. Um.
Speaker 1: But you could use the reusable pay prot do that too,
Speaker 1: and the electronic ink would give you the opportunity to
Speaker 1: have the same page and only use one page and
Speaker 1: have it change depending on what it is that you
Speaker 1: need to display. Wow, that's pretty cool. And for you
Speaker 1: office managers out there who are kind of curious as
Speaker 1: to how much how much waste both environmental and just
Speaker 1: solid waste your printers are generating, Xerox has come up
Speaker 1: with a neat little tool for you called a sustainability calculator,
Speaker 1: And you just go to the to xerox is page
Speaker 1: and look for the sustainability calculator. What it does, is it?
Speaker 1: It lets you put in a couple of points of input,
Speaker 1: mainly how fast your printers work, how many you have, um,
Speaker 1: how many images you print on average in a in
Speaker 1: a certain period of time, and then it calculates how
Speaker 1: much how much solid waste it produces, how many how
Speaker 1: many greenhouse gases it might produce, um, how much energy
Speaker 1: it consumes. It can really help you see what your
Speaker 1: carbon foot print is as far as your printing side
Speaker 1: of operations go, and maybe make some changes if you
Speaker 1: if if things are looking kind of grim, you can
Speaker 1: maybe downsize the printers and make more have more of
Speaker 1: a centralized printing location, and that can help out a lot.
Speaker 1: Of course, the easiest way to uh, to minimize this
Speaker 1: waste and electronic or impact of electronic devices is to
Speaker 1: use them as minimally as possible. Don't print more than
Speaker 1: you need to. And that's that basically comes down to
Speaker 1: you and me, right Yeah, like I said, putting the
Speaker 1: human element right back in there. Um. Yeah, the the
Speaker 1: these manufacturers are working really hard to make things as
Speaker 1: easy as possible for it to be green. Now it's
Speaker 1: up for us to carry it the rest of the way.
Speaker 1: I guess we should probably wrap this up. We've talked
Speaker 1: about a lot of different subjects here, but if you
Speaker 1: want to learn more about just one in particular, I
Speaker 1: suggest reading how electronic ink works at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. And we'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think, send an email to
Speaker 1: podcast and how stuff works dot come. Brought to you
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