Xerox Researches Reusable Paper

Printouts would fade, allowing paper to be reused.

Erica Naone 09/26/2007

2 Comments

Xerox is currently researching reusable paper, according to CTO Sophie Vandebroek, who discussed the project yesterday at the Emerging Technologies Conference. Printouts made on the paper would fade in a specified period of time, allowing the paper to be reused. Vandebroek compares it to lenses that take on a darker tint in the sun and then fade once they're removed from sunlight. The technology is still very much in the research phase, but she ultimately expects the paper to be especially useful in the corporate world, where she says that 40 percent of printed documents are discarded a short time after they are printed.

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briang1621

173 Comments

1597 Days Ago
09/30/2007

Interestingly Usefull

This could be quite usefull. Imagine organization that print out manuals then reprint the manuals later, having a option to reuse paper could save thousands per year.
Brian Glassman
Commercialization
Innovation Management

briang1621

173 Comments

1597 Days Ago
09/30/2007

Letter to the editor

Xerox researcher announced that they recently developed printouts that fade over time, allowing the paper to be reused in a certain amount of time, allowing companies to reuse that paper for future printing. Interestingly through my research in technology innovation I found that applying an inverse logic can also create new inventions out of novel ideas.
To illustrate this, imagine a printout in which text appeared after a given amount of time. Visualize picking up an old policies manual and seeing in big letters, “OUT OF DATE, PLEASE DISCARD” over the main text on each page.
This technology could be simply created by having an ink chemically sensitive to air which becomes visible overtime. The exposure time of the appearing ink could be varied based on the amount of ink dispensed. Hopefully, this may even be integrated into simple hand stamps. Thus, with your next invention apply a little inverse logic to see if anything else novel can be invented as well.

Brian Glassman
Ph.D. Student in Technology Commercialization
Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana
Commercialization
Innovation Management