Link Banana

The Economist’s Tech.view columnist thinks that the time is ripe for disappearing ink (or erasable paper) to replace the old-fashioned kind:

But once we’ve finished with the hard copies, they are often dumped in the recycling container, rubbish bin or even shredder. In a survey of its own printers, copiers and waste-paper bins, Xerox found that two out of five sheets printed were used only once and then discarded after a day.

That seems an awful waste. It takes around 200,000 joules of energy to make a sheet of paper. The average office worker in America prints out 1,200 sheets a month. The energy consumed in manufacturing that amount of paper—not to mention the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process—is equivalent a 100-watt light bulb burning for a month.

Pundits reckon over 15 trillion pieces of paper are printed annually around the world—a figure that is expected to grow 30% over the next ten years. To feed our appetite for paper, whole forests have to chopped down. Surely it would be better if we could reuse our paper—in short, stick it back in the printer or copier rather than trash it.