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Self-erasing paper

October 22, 2007 at 10:29
filed under art+design+technology

The paperless office concept was first introduced in a Business Week article in ’75 and became a powerful buzzword. We all know now that is was all hype and that paper consumption has steadily risen in the office since then. Why? Simply because it’s easy to use, and unlike computer applications, you don’t need to know how everything works to get your thoughts arranged and your point across. As a Xerox researcher in the ‘Future of Documents‘ department says:

“images are worth a thousand words, as they say, but paper is worth a thousand electronic documents when it comes to communication around the document and its content.”

GreenPrint‘s web site states the following facts:

• The average office worker in the US prints 10,000 pages per year
• The U.S. is by far the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper. Per capita U.S. paper consumption is over six times greater than the world average.
• Global paper products consumption has tripled over the past three decades and is expected to grow by half again before 2010.
• The U.S. pulp and paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry.

Although it might be old news to some, I only recently discovered what could be an important breakthrough for our paper consumption, which was announced by Xerox in November 2006:

The Xerox scientists have invented a way to make prints whose images last only a day, so that the paper can be used again and again. The technology, which is still in a preliminary state, blurs the line between paper documents and digital displays and could ultimately lead to a significant reduction in paper use.

Xerox has filed for patents on the technology, which it calls “erasable paper.”

To develop erasable paper, researchers needed to identify ways to create temporary images. The “a-ha” moment came from developing compounds that change color when they absorb a certain wavelength of light but then will gradually disappear. In its present version, the paper self-erases in about 16-24 hours and can be used multiple times.

While potential users have shown interest in transient documents, there is still much to be done if the technology is to be commercialized.

The Xerox technology was recently chosen by the Wall Street Journal as the top innovation in the environment category. Let’s hope this will create as much buzz as the ‘paperless office’ created and that we will all soon be printing on ‘transient paper’ reducing our excessive dependency on paper.

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