Epson, one of the world’s most recognizable printer companies, recently announced a green innovation that could fundamentally change the office.
Epson’s PaperLab is capable of turning an office into a little recycling center. That’s right. This prototype device makes fresh paper from your old paper scraps right in your office. According to Epson, the machine can produce 14 sheets of paper per minute, and requires very little water to function, which is a major shift away from how paper is currently produced.
Water is a precious and increasingly scarce resource, and its use by the paper industry remains a major unsolved problem. While energy use and air pollution decreased between 2010-2012, water use increased significantly during that same period. Each piece of letter-sized paper made using traditional methods requires 2-3 gallons of water to produce. And while there are certainly bigger offenders, it’s clear that production innovations like PaperLab will help.
The benefits of PaperLab to offices are so obvious they almost don’t need to be stated. An office would be able to produce its own paper (and different types of paper for that matter) from paper waste, reducing costs and waste at the same time. It would also render paper shredders useless, since transforming sensitive documents into fresh, blank paper is a great way to destroy the information.
Epson plans to introduce PaperLab in Japan sometime in 2016, but has no firm date yet for when it will be brought to the United States. Estimates are that the machine might cost around $75,000 – by no means cheap – but certainly affordable for the Apples and Googles of the world.
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Epson Develops the World’s First Office Papermaking System that Turns Waste Paper into New Paper
Photo courtesy of EPSON.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.