We recently upgraded our old colour printer and purchased at new Xerox Phaser 8560 multifunction printer for our studio.
We seek to use every opportunity we can to reduce our impact on the environment and the first step to doing so when it comes to printing is to simply print less.
But given we cannot reduce our printing to none at all, we had a number of questions about our new printer’s environmental impact that we hoped would guide our choice (apart from the crucial question of whether it produced high-quality prints).
They were:
- Is it made of recycled materials?
- Does the manufacturer take responsibility of the machine at the end of its life? Is it then recycled? Can it be recycled?
- Energy use – how much does it use when printing or when on standby?
- Cartridges – can they be refilled? can they be recycled?
- Can it print double sided?
- Can it print on recycled paper?
- Can it print on reused paper? (we want to be able to reuse our scrap paper)
Sadly, it is very hard to get answers to most of these questions and even several phone conversations with the tech teams at various printer companies yielded little information that could help us choose our printer.
We also became aware of the pollution caused by some printers in offices – a team at the Queensland University of Technology recently found that a third of printer emit dangerous levels of toner into the air, causing significant health problems for office workers.
Fortunately most companies offer cartridge recycling through a program run by Planet Ark, in conjunction with Close the Loop, a fantastic example of a business that exists to solve an environmental problem.
After comparing the relative performance of various printers and their manufacturers one easily stood out from the rest. Where some printer companies produce sustainability reports and belong to Planet Ark’s program, Fuji Xerox have embedded care for the environment deeply into their product development. They have formal processes to design for the environment and their Eco Manufacturing Centre in Zetland is a great demonstration of their commitment to this.
Better still, Fuji Xerox have also eliminated the problems caused by toner and toner cartridges cartridges by removing them completely from several of their models (incl. the one we use) – replacing them with solid ink that is not in a powdered form and does not require a casing.
We have also found this system prints easily onto scrap paper without jamming, enabling us to significantly reduce the amount we use, plus it has a fax which means we can unplug our old one – by using less appliances we reduce our energy use too.
So, after all that, we now have a new printer. And it works great.
1 Comment...
Things like the dangerous amounts of toner causing office-space air pollution make one wonder how many other health risks can be found in everyday work and living spaces, as well as how simple it really would be to clear it up.