One year on - and still more paper

It was a little over a year ago that I wrote about printers in Computing. Back then I focused on the fact that, while the technology behind the actual printing process - getting the ink or toner onto the paper - has come on in leaps and bounds, the actual technology of paper has not changed one bit.

A year on, little has moved on. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an environmentalist, but printing in its current guise is a wasteful business, consuming an ever-growing number of trees, making it an unfortunate write-once technology.

So what's the answer? Well it certainly isn't the paperless office. All attempts to achieve this have failed.

And we have to accept that, even in the most efficient of electronic workplaces, there will continue to be a reliance on paper somewhere in the process, and on the ability to take the text from the screen and print it out on-demand.

Last year I wrote about the various 'electronic paper' technologies being worked on by the likes of Xerox and Epson, but these remain concept technologies and are nowhere near ready to leave the confines of the R&D lab, let alone go on general sale.

But electronic paper that can be wiped clean, just like an Etch-a-Sketch, is not necessarily the best solution for coping with increased demand for the printed page.

Ideally, what we need is a shift in printing technology whereby normal paper can still be used, but where the pages can be reused, and the print on them removed (with maybe the toner from the page being recycled and reused as well), allowing the sheets to be printed on again and again like a rewritable disk.

In theory this should not be too difficult to do with laser-printed pages; after all they use static electricity to attach bits of black toner to the page.

This mechanism should lend itself to being reversed, allowing the toner to be stripped off the page, although any such technology is likely to require a new form of toner that does not saturate the paper. To achieve this might also require a move away from traditional pulp-based paper.

In my last column on this subject I wrote about an excellent public experiment carried out by The Guardian, giving an example of what a personalised and summarised newspaper could look like.

Most interesting was the fact that it was not printed on paper, but on a synthetic fabric called Tyvek, made by DuPont.

The material can be printed on and handled like paper, but is waterproof and tear-proof. It was originally developed with banknotes in mind, as a way to keep notes in circulation for longer.

Synthetic sheet material such as Tyvek is one answer, but there is no guarantee that it will be compatible with all existing printers. To ensure that means that you still need to use paper or something that is paper-based.

But if it's a blue-sky solution you are after, I have one for you. The other night I was watching an episode of Babylon 5 (the sci-fi series that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine should have been, but never was) when I spotted two fantastic concepts.

One was a personalised newspaper - a send-up of USA Today called Universe Today, that was individually printed and collated, based on the customer's news preferences.

The other was that they recycled the previous day's paper, which was somehow wiped clean and reprinted in a split second. If only we could do that with the News of the World!