A sizeable business will likely use a lot of paper – generally speaking, the paperless office hasn’t almost arrived yet – but what if you could take those used documents and chuck them in a machine on-premise which is capable of recycling them into fresh sheets of A4? It’s normally done in a warehouse facility with giant machinery that isn’t exactly office-friendly, though – so in this way, PaperLab is unique (unless you count the White Goat, which converts office paper into toilet paper). In addition, the company says it wanted to develop technology that would change the paper cycle, giving new value to paper and stimulate recycling. The machine has been named Paper Lab by the company and it plans to launch commercial production of the same in Japan in the year 2016 itself.
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The company recently announced PaperLab, the world’s first in-office paper recycling system, as Ars Technica first reported.
While paper is a simple and popular communication medium, it is also produced from a limited resource.
Although Epson is staying mum on how much power and waste paper the device requires, the company did explain its three-step process for creating new paper.
A developmental prototype of the PaperLab will be demonstrated at the Epson booth location 4-002 at Eco-Products 2015, an environmental exhibition that will take place at the Tokyo Big Sight (Tokyo International Exhibition Center) from December 10 to 12. The machine developed for the objective does not need water for the entire process.
Elaborating the process of making new papers from the waste ones, the Tokyo-headquartered company shows that the Dry Fiber technology initially fiberise the water paper using an original mechanism and then bind and form the fibers to produce new sheets. You can make thick business card stock or thin printer paper – even scented stationery to send to that special someone. Users can expect to purchase less new paper and reduce their transport CO₂ emissions.
Additionally, because the machine breaks paper down into paper fibers, confidential documents can be destroyed onsite rather than the task being outsourced to contractors to shred securely. The patent describes how waste paper is crushed using a “defibrating unit”, with the ink then removed by spinning the crushed matter through an air cyclone.
Next, the fibers are bound together with other material to increase paper strength and whiteness.
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View the product concept movie below.
