Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Xerox Researches Reusable Paper
Printouts would fade, allowing paper to be reused.
By Erica Naone
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.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
Brian Glassman
Commercialization
Innovation Management
briang1621
09/30/2007
Posts:92
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 Visualize picking up an old policies manual and seeing in big letters, “OUT OF DATE, PLEASE DISCARD” over the main text on each page.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
briang1621
09/30/2007
Posts:92