Printing & Imaging Blog

As we’ve noted earlier in “Paper Choices Make the Most of Color Printer Output,” paper manufacturers and independent standards organizations are promoting new types of stock certified for the amount of recycled materials they use and for the environmentally conscious manufacturing practices that produced them.

Now Xerox has recently joined the bandwagon with choices such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified Color Xpressions Planet 20. It consists of 20 percent post-consumer, recycled-content and is targeted for digital color print jobs, including presentations, proposals, and brochures. The company also offers the Business Multipurpose 4200 paper, a FSC-certified choice for more general-purpose applications.

But an even more intriguing paper possibility was shown at the WIRED NextFest conference earlier this month. With an experimental erasable paper, Xerox designers are developing media that may eventually be used over and over by businesses attempting to stem the glut of office paper usage.

The prototype paper uses a special chemical coating that reacts to different wavelengths of light to “print” text onto the page. But after a day, the text disappears and the paper is ready for reusing. Xerox intends for the stock to address what industry studies have identified as the 40 percent of printouts that users discard the day they print them.