Office Papermaking System That Turns Waste Paper into New Paper | Hacker News Reader

Office Papermaking System That Turns Waste Paper into New Paper

global.epson.com

116 pointse1929300136 comments

"...this essential tool is also produced from a limited resource."

Noop. Paper comes from trees. Trees are not a limited resource. They grow again. A well-managed forest will provide forever. Looking at the complexity of this machine, the plastics and metal used, and its probable energy consumption, I doubt it is any more environmentally friendly than new or traditional recycled paper.

I also cannot see this thing recycling forever. It adds chemicals, binders, to the new paper. Subsequent generations will be more and more binder and less and less paper. So the process will need an intake of new paper at one end, and a disposal of used paper waste at the other. And now instead of relatively harmless paper ready for recycling, that waste is toxic sludge of binders and fragrances.

I think that line is meant to refer to water rather than wood.

That's even worse.

> I doubt it is any more environmentally friendly than new or traditional recycled paper.

Traditional recycled paper requires fully loaded trucks travelling for kilometers to the recycling factories and other trucks moving the produced paper around until it its the stores again. Machine like this eliminates all that back and forth.

It's possible that the efficiency of having a plant specialize in recycling paper makes up for the energy used in transportation.

My first thought was to question the energy efficiency of this kind of system. However, it's interesting from the angle of secure document destruction: the system is essentially a high security shredder with a side effect of spitting out "new" paper.

The NSA has apparently been pulping its paper waste for a while: https://www.nsa.gov/about/commitment/nsa_goes_green/nsa_recy...

The biggest and oldest ones I've ever seen first hand were the "Document Disintegration Systems" shredders at Teufelsberg!

http://dasalte.ccc.de/teufelsberg/teufelsberg.html

http://dasalte.ccc.de/teufelsberg/teufelsberg-Pages/Image25....

That's an impressive achievement. But how many offices use substantial amounts of paper entirely internally any more?

The big problem with paper recycling is that the fibers get shorter on each pass, resulting in weaker paper. Going closed-cycle on paper is going to make that problem worse. It's not like aluminum, where you can go round and round forever without deterioration. Now if the system can take junk mail as a feedstock, it will be more useful.

Tons of profitable companies still run on a lot of paper. I worked at an insurance company where the head of the most profitable division (earth quake) that actively discouraged the Idea of moving huge insurance contracts to digital. Anecdotal, but I assume this is not unique.

It's a lot harder to do discovery on 100 tons of paper in a vault than on ten tons of disk drives.

I have often thought it would be cynically useful to use a font that makes it hard to OCR text for exactly this reason.

Programs are now better than humans at that, as the CAPTCHA people have discovered the hard way.

Definitely not just anecdotal. I think people on HN might be flabbergasted by how many businesses in industries worth billions still largely operate with paper.

Problem with staying ahead of the curve is that you cannot see how huge the curve is.

Highest margins in the company. Thanks for validating my choice not to buy an earthquake policy.

Worked at a sales department in 2010, my office (or closet) was in front of the main A3 printer. It was running dusk till dawn. Most of the employee despise computers (partially for good reasons: bad IT contracts and not tailored tools and devices => rageprint).

Most of the prints had a lifespan of 1 hours before being thrown out. Mostly scratchpad for too large spreadsheets.

In Japan, paper is still really commonplace in offices and in other institutions (schools, retail, factories etc). A lot of old technologies like fax are still commonplace in Japan so this makes a lot of sense there.

Also a lot of older large corporations in the UK and USA still largely rely on large amounts paper for forms, newsletters etc.

So I still see it being quite useful in a lot of current markets.

I'm told by relatives that paper remains the easiest way to transfer medical records, either by courier or by fax, which are then scanned in. The move to electronic medical records has reduced the need to store paper records (which, interestingly, is expensive), but it hasn't done much to reduce the amount of paper consumed.

It amazes me how little integration there is between medical systems, even now. I recently experienced being transferred into the local hospital's emergency department by ambulance, and while both ambulance and hospital had fully digital records, they had to manually copy everything off the ambulance's tablet screen into the hospital's system. And then at the end of the process a letter was printed to be sent to our doctor, and presumably entered into the database that they use.

I get that integration is hard, but the number of errors that must be introduced with so much transcription is ridiculous.

Youd be amazed at the number of insurance companies with pretty web front ends and paper records behind it all at the other end

> That's an impressive achievement. But how many offices use substantial amounts of paper entirely internally any more?

Just to add to the data points: nearly every large engineering firm, or any utility (power/water/O&G/etc.) with an engineering capability. Most drawings are still printed for markup/review, and many are issued as hard copies to be retained on-site (within switchrooms, cabinets, etc).

I've been around lots of government offices, and all of them generate vast piles of paper for internal uses, often one time use.

Not sure where they get their figures from but according to http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/facts-about-paper-the-imp... the average office worker continues to use a staggering 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year.

This seems very useful for schools, who both need lots of paper (still even now) and who need it only for a short time.

Schools have the space and resources for such a machine, and they could potentially save lots of money and paper that otherwise goes into the trash at home. It all depends on the costs of the system.

Ahh, the cycle of bureaucracy[0].

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/tIFidJt.gif

Great!

BTW., when linking to GIFs at imgur, please append 'v' to the file extension, i.e. https://i.imgur.com/tIFidJt.gifv - .gifv are much smaller and also play back smoother.

Knowing Epson, the catch is probably along the lines of "requires consumable cartridges that cost as much as the machine itself".

I'm only half-joking.

You're less than half joking! Epson says it can print colored and scented paper.

Remember the "iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer" from DigiScents? "The device contained a cartridge with 128 "primary odors" which could be mixed to replicate natural and man-made odors. DigiScents had indexed thousands of common odors, which could be coded, digitized, and embedded into web pages or email." [1]

"We expect to have low-end and high-end iSmell hardware," Smith agrees. "The low end may retail for under $200. The smell cartridges - even at the high end - will probably cost under $50." With moderate use, he guesses, they should last a few months." [2]

DigiScents claimed they were going to make money [3] by following the Epson printer model, selling the device for cheap, while making money on the cartridges. I imagine that the cookie scent would get used up a lot faster than the poopie scent, then you have to replace the whole monolithic cartridge of 128 odors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell

[2] https://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/digiscent_pr.ht...

[3] http://www.startupover.com/en/20-million-burning-smell-like-...

Without water, even assuming people don't mix in colored papers, won't the recycled papers get darker and darker? Maybe the fibers are so small that it just throws away the dark ones.

It doesn't say without chemicals. That's what I read into it.

Yeah, it prominently mentions binders.

A variety of different binders can be added to the fiberized material to increase the binding strength or whiteness of the paper or to add color, fragrance, flame resistance, or other properties needed for a given application.

The binders are white (often partially clay), so there is white being added to the process.

It's hard to imagine that this machine could be cheaper to own and operate than just buying new paper. If it's not then it's just a show-off item for Epson that nobody will actually use.

However, if it is cheaper, that might be a game changer! Maybe it does it by eliminating the collection and sorting costs from traditional recycling.

I think the point is that it combines both supplying new paper and disposing old paper. In particular, companies generally won't use "traditional recycling" for destroying confidential documents, instead opting for services provided by a contractor (which will be more expensive).

Most tech companies won't have a need for this, but there are lots of industries that might, depending on the actual cost of the system.

This machine is not going to help the most common use of paper in the offices these days as the monitor stands and height elevators for the tables.

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