The article "Plastic Paper to 'cut' emissions", found on the BBC news site, talks about how the Toshiba electronics company has developed a thermal printer that uses "plastic paper." The "paper" is made from a plastic known as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) that is the same type of plastic used for soda bottles. A thin layer of PET gets a coating of heat sensitive pigment that gets heated or cooled to make it black or white. This "paper" can be reused up to 500 times with text or graphics. The printer has a resolution of 12 dots per millimeter or 300 dpi. With the re-use of the "PET paper" this new printer has comparable costs to today's Industrial laser printers, but costs about $10 a sheet.
The B-SX8R (the printer) is only available in Japan at the moment but is expected to be launched in Europe by 2008. It is being introduced to help reduce carbon emissions because when compared to traditional laser printers it produces about one sixth of the carbon emissions. It will also help reduce the amount of paper that the companies with this technology use. It is not intended to replace paper but it should help a lot in "closed-loop" situations. However, with the plastic of the substrate the solid waste may not meet specifications for introduction into Europe.
I think that this technology sounds really neat, especially because we are all involved in the printing industry. This could be a new step towards future technology that we will all be using, you never know. Although, it does sound like it has a few bugs to get worked out first.
Comments (1)
Interesting technology- what applications would be good candidates for using plastic paper?
Posted by Pat | January 7, 2007 11:07 PM
Posted on January 7, 2007 23:07