Soy-Based Toner Cartridges? 389
Jon.Laslow writes "I'm getting a lot of pressure from managers to switch to soy-based toner cartridges for our laser printers because they are 'greener.' The problem is, the only information I can find on them is from sales pitches; and the reviews all seem to be user testimonials. Do you have any experience soy-based printing products? Did you have any issues with them, and how was the print quality?"
Buy one... (Score:4, Funny)
...and let us know.
Soy Ink Green is (Score:5, Funny)
People!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That movie never made any sense to me. If the only food supply is people, how long can a society last? A human body would feed you for maybe one week. Then what do you use to survive?
The Matrix has a similar flaw
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The movie is a second or third-level derivative. Look at the original short story by IIRC Harry Harrison (entitled "Roommates" according to Wikipedia, though I'm quite sure that I read it under the next title) ; some years later Harrison expanded the short story into a novel and called it "Make Room!, Make Room!" ; I'm not clear on whether the novel formed the basis for the screenplay, or whether both were developed in parallel (this is about the time that "2001" underw
Re:Buy one... (Score:5, Informative)
Standard toner consists of a pigment suspended in a petroleum-based polymer. As such, toner has the environmental impact of any other consumable plastic, including off-gassing and the potential exhaustion of a non-renewable resources. The real problem, however, is that toner must be removed from pulp when recycling paper. The toner removal process uses toxic chemicals and produces a non-biodegradable and non-recyclable sludge waste product.
new to me (Score:5, Informative)
To be honest, I hadn't even heard of this. This article [rechargermag.com] says the very first cartridges just became available at the end of last year. Amazon has them [amazon.com] but it looks they all come from one company (the one mentioned in the article I linked) and I couldn't find any reviews or comments. I did notice that as far as I can tell they are the only company selling soy based toner cartridges and they only sell them for HP right now - though I guess they plan to add others in the future. That may solve your issue right there though, unless you own the right printers.
Interestingly enough the link in TFA doesn't seem to point to a company that does anything other than refurbish and refill toner cartridges with regular toner. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see a thing about soy based toner. I'm sure someone will point me in the right direction on that if I'm mistaken.
So I'd be interested as well in hearing if anyone has actually used this yet, but unless it has been an immediate disaster it doesn't seem that enough time has passed to tell how well it is going to work.
Ad absurdium (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me get this straight...
You build an extremely precise little box out of highly refined metals, circuit boards and PCBs, manufactured from parts made all around the world before being shipped thousands of miles to your local Staples, and you're worried about the half ounce of INK!?!?!
That's like cuttng calories by skipping the cherry on your triple scoop ice cream sundae!
Want to go green? Use CFLs. Replace your shower heads. Bike to work. Email instead of printing. Open windows rather than hit the thermostat. Use GotoMeeting rather than fly. Plant some trees on the South side of your home and office buildings. Buy your food from a local Farmer's Market rather than the mega-mart to avoid 'fresh' food from Argentina or some other place 4,000 miles away in refrigerated containers.
When the ink jet containers themselves are made of soy, and the mfgs standardize their cartridges so that reuse is more feasible, I'll take notice. Otherwise, this flavor of 'green' is idotic.
Buy Soy ink because it's better, lasts longer, or is cheaper and don't delude yourself with false green.
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Informative)
Want to go green? ... [snip list of recommendations that don't relate to the computer industry] ... When the ink jet containers themselves are made of soy, and the mfgs standardize their cartridges so that reuse is more feasible, I'll take notice.
I'd offer the suggestion that increased attention on the part of consumers and manufacturers to the polluting nature of manufacturing computer parts (and petroleum products in general) is a step in the right direction. Or do you really think we can get somewhere without taking one step at a time?
Anything that's used by individuals in small quantities may be insignificant, but taken as a whole, there's probably a incredibly large number behind the quantity that's manufactured. And then dump in our water or land.
I'm no green nut, but seriously, loosen up. Soy ink? Why the hell not? The newspaper industry adopted it years ago, and while the formulation isn't exactly 100% natural, it was a step in the right direction.
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Informative)
Soy ink? Why the hell not?
Tackle the biggest issues first, the smaller issues become the biggest.
For my personal context that means: car (100), heating (73), electricity (26), exotic food imports (3)...
My next car will have about 25% more fuel efficiency, and if I drive 20% less distance I will bring the weighted score for my car to 60. Or a 20% improvement of my energy consumption (40/(100+73+26))
Now, what would be the effect if I was planning on how to buy more environmental friendly toiletpaper? 0.001 points (haven't got any actual data to back that up), but worse, I would be side tracked and not tackle things that have a big impact.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the real backlash a lot of people have is that a lot of "environmental" stuff is information from marketers, not engineers. We don't want to be told "use this, it's better". We want to see the analysis, what could have been done differently, and see that the company chose the best option (most bang for the buck). And we get mad when the decisions don't make sense (for the consumer).
Example: company could ship only high-capacity toner cartridges, rather than half-size "starter" packs, at a minimal
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Funny)
Actually I think we can get farther by taking an angry mob and beating with sacks of potatoes and doorknobs every manager and yuppie that talks about "being green" and suggests stupid non green ways. Soap in a sock works great as well.
Anyone at your office is against telecommuting? beat the shit out of them. They driving a hybrid instead of using real Green alternatives? Beat the shit out of them. a fully window office is wasted for the exeutive that is never there? Beat the shit out of him. Continue until they are crying and hiding under their desks, or actually get a clue.
Common Geek Fallacies (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do you really think we can get somewhere without taking one step at a time?
Actually, most geeks are under the faith-based assumption that at some point, this is entirely possible. That Transporter Pads or Jump Drives or simple Teleportation is merely a question of time. It is so inculcated our geek culture that certain things will simply come easy once the elegant solution appears, as if by magic. Further, I think it affects how we view most problems.
Take environmentalism. Clearly the solution is greener products; things that will fit into a sustainable economy. But it's a binary clause; if your entire product can be green, then it should be. Otherwise, who are you fooling!? There is no sense of bootstrapping, of having to replace pieces as you can.
The subset of the culture that subscribes heavily to this stance tends to be against refactoring code, and for simply writing programs wholesale by themselves in their attic. They're against good test procedures and using older technologies because they're not shiny enough. Ironically, they're also the sorts who probably haven't written their own libraries - or even approached the idea. They buy most of their stuff, because whatever their realm of expertise, it's limited in scope. Fix plumbing? Hell no! Drill something, or saw something? What is the point - something you pay for is clearly going to be better, and in the end that arbitrary sense of idealistic quality is all that matters.
I hope that as we move forward we get more geeks like you, value_added, who recognize that it's not about suddenly being in Nirvana. It's about constantly changing the little bits that are pain points once any better solution becomes available, rather than holding out for some mythical day brought about in some opaque fashion wherein everything is just right of it's own accord.
In the end it's simple economics; the time-value of progress suggests that a little 'money' or 'value' now, and a little later, and a little later will yield a total greater value than a simple lump sum at the end.
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are obviously an idiot. Allow me dissect:
You build an extremely precise little box out of highly refined metals, circuit boards and PCBs, manufactured from parts made all around the world before being shipped thousands of miles to your local Staples, and you're worried about the half ounce of INK!?!?!
You didn't read the parent, or if you did you didn't actually understand the question. INK DOES NOT EQUAL TONER. Get it through your head. One would expect someone reading Slashdot to know this, but apparently that's what I get for assuming. Toner cartridges for laser printers print thousands of sheets if not tens of thousands of sheets per refill. Quickest way to have an office budget go haywire is to have all printing done on inkjet, which is why it isn't
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Insightful)
Mercury that one broken bulb can raise airborne mercury levels in your house to above safe levels.
Light bulbs don't break during normal operation, let alone CFLs which are made of much sturdier glass. Unless you play your baseball indoors you probably have better things to worry about.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Informative)
According to the EPA [energystar.gov], the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere every year is 104 metric tons, mostly created by coal fired power plants. Since most of the mercury is bound to the CFL bulb as it is used, even if every CFL that was sold in 2007 (290 million bulbs) were sent to landfill, it would only release
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp [snopes.com]
Everyone involved agrees a $2000 cleanup crew is ridiculous and should never have been recommended. It was never in fact used, as the person who broke the bulb couldn't afford it. There are now published cleanup instructions from various environmental agencies along the lines of "ventilate the room well".
Per the WP article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Mercury_emissions [wikipedia.org] ... ...
"CFLs, like all fluorescent lamps, contain small amounts of mercury as vapor inside the glass tubing, averaging 4.0 mg per bulb
In areas powered by coal, CFLs end up saving on mercury emissions versus incandescent bulbs, due to the offset power use (coal releases mercury as it is burned).
In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 tons) that year."
So, yeah, use CFLs.
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Funny)
There's probably a dozen more dangerous chemicals then mercury in most kitchens.
Ah, I see you've tasted my cooking.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're older, like me, you can remember breaking one or more mercury thermometers as a child. Thermometers have 50 mg to 3 g [purdue.edu]. So as toxic as mercury may be, you'd have to break more than a dozen CFLs to have the household exposure that pretty much every house in the nation had each time a child playing with a thermometer dropped it a few decades back.
That, as we know, ended civilization. It was precisely like the lead pipes to the Romans.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the current crop of cheap CFLs are not green by any stretch of the imagination.
Why not side step the CFL problem all together by using these? [earthled.com]
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:5, Informative)
Power factor doesn't quite work that way. Power factor is not like an efficiency. A bulb with a power factor of .5 (terrible, but common for CFLs) doesn't ACTUALLY consume double the power that it would at a PF of 1. It DOES double the resistive losses in the wiring and so should be corrected, but that's not the same as doubling total energy consumption.
It's a problem for power companies because most of the losses are incurred on their side of the meter so they don't get to bill for it.
Note though, since a 60Watt equivalent CFL will be 14 Watts, even doubling it to 28Watts would leave you well ahead of the game.
Longer term, whole house power factor correction is an option. Or the utility can add it per neighborhood. Finally, it could be added at the light socket. If the power companies start installing meters that measure power factor and providing billing incentives for correcting power factor (as they do for larger customers now), the power factor problem will be fixed.
Even better, A major limitation of CFLs is that they must fit a majority of lamps and fixtures designed for incandescent bulbs. That sets an upper limit on the size of the electronics. In turn, that means they design the electronics with a limited life and make them disposable.
Ideally, the electronics would be a separate long life module and the actual fluorescent tube would be the disposable part. Then it would be practical to include power factor correction in the electronics.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Have I missed something here? Soy is the vegetarian meat, but as such is no greener than other forms of carbon. (Or is toner made from fried/burnt animals
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When the ink jet containers themselves are made of soy, and the mfgs standardize their cartridges so that reuse is more feasible,
Most laser carts are eminently refillable, which is why there's a whole industry based on it.
It behooves you to purchase a laser printer with carts known to be refillable, and if you didn't do this you made a poor purchasing decision (color lasers are exempt from this statement.)
Toner is one of the most toxic things in your office, and it releases horrible nasty shit when it is fused. If a Soy-based product were substantially better in this regard, that might be sufficient justification to switch.
Re:Ad absurdium (Score:4, Insightful)
The parent hit on one of the most important issues related to local agriculture: seasonality. Getting produce when it is naturally in season in your area will really reduce carbon output for the produce. My prof subscribed to a local organic agriculture program where he received produce in season for over half the year. Not only did he reduce his carbon footprint but he liked the fact that every few weeks he'd get something totally different (with suggested recipes). He'd get types of produce he'd never seen before and couldn't buy in a store if he wanted to.
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I'm a bit peeved at organic farming, because it is deliberately under-utilizing land and being purposely inefficient at creating one of the most precious resources on Earth: food. Organic crops are just luxuries for the rich. (By rich, I an including the majority of Americans.) If the world switched to growing most
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Deliberately under-utilizing land?
That's a laugh. Organic yields are pretty close to non-organic yields; never mind the fact that it can just as easily be argued that current factory farming methods are deliberately over-utilising land in an unsustainable way (unsustainable due to the environmental impact which is often externali
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That depends where you are.
I'm in England. In the winter, British tomatoes can be grown in an artificially heated greenhouse, with not that much sun. Spanish tomatoes can grow in a naturally heated greenhouse. The Netherlands climate is the same as the UK, but they have a lot of greenhouses heated by "waste" heat from power plants.
In all these cases, the distance isn't that great, and apparently Dutch or Spanish tomatoes have a lower CO2 production cost than British ones (and most British people won't buy B
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Benefits: ...
Savings in toner, paper, energy, filing space, shredder and printer wear-and-tear, people get *some* exercise, reduced consumption of post-its as people no longer tack stickies to print-outs, photocopy the result, then hand THAT around, no more "where is that piece of paper"
like someone else said, a waist of good oxygen. (Score:3, Funny)
like someone else said, a waist of good oxygen.
News Flash: Oxygen makes you FAT! Get the new K-Tel de-oxygenator and loose that Belly Buddha today! The kit consists of an eco-green-colored plastic bag marked "This bag IS a toy", shipped inside a clear plastic bag for your convenience. Simply place it over your head, use the included geek-friendly duct tape to seal it around your neck, and never have to worry about waist oxygen making you look fat again. Also cuts down on oxygen waste as well, so you know it's eco-friendly.
And if you order now, as a sp
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
soon slashdot users will be harvested for their ink :)
I would hate to be in the small, but very vulnerable intersection of Slashdot readers and squids.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Toner is either carbon based, or far more commonly a polymer. A fine powder of plastic if you will. Take one giant slab of coloured plastic, grind it up in to a very fine powder, add some creative marketing and an astronomical price tag.
Oh come on. Carbon, I would believe (so would you if you'd ever had an engine apart) but plastic??!?!
Plastic and carbon are completely different things! Carbon is black and hard, and plastic is soft and shiny. Sheesh, I thought /. was supposed to be full of smart people!
Next thing you're gonna start talking nonsense about bacon and pork being from the same animal!
Lickable sheets anyone? (Score:3, Funny)
So, basically, they could create lickable sheets with that process? ... Makes the Rolling Stones tongue [991.com] suddenly look completely different ...
Did you search? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did you search? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
No, not when I try. I have it set for 100 results, and the only place I even see the word Chicago is related to this link: http://www.examiner.com/x-8120-Chicago-Business-Technology-Examiner~y2009m4d23-Maine-company-offers-first-soybased-toner-cartridges-for-offices-schools [examiner.com]. If I put quotes around your search term, I see no mention of Chicago at all.
Re:Did you search? (Score:4, Funny)
Further proof of the internet conspiracy to make SigNuZX728 look like an idiot.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
For Coffee Too (Score:2)
The good news is that if you run out of creamer you can just toss some soy-toner in there, virtually the same thing.
Be Green (Score:5, Insightful)
Soy Ink? What a freaking joke! The total octopi, or whatever they get ink from, saved by Soy Ink, is truly insignificant.
If your company wants to be green, they need to buy recycled paper, or buy a sustainable forest, or replace all that horrid grass outside with natural prairie and woods.
When are people going to get that using "green" products is still producing consumer waste, and that if you want to truly make an impact, you need to ride your bike sometimes, or something!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If you want green and soy, nothing beats soylent green.
Re:Be Green (Score:5, Informative)
Soy toner has two things really going for it: first is, it's easier (ie cheaper) to recycle. Paper with soy toner is easier to recycle. Second, the cost is about the same as normal toner.
I haven't actually seen it in use, so I can't say what it will look like, but if the quality is equivalent to that of carbon based toner, then there is no reason not to use it, and a few small reasons TO use it.
Re:Be Green (Score:4, Insightful)
So all that's left is "how does it hold in front of humidity" ?
This is a major advantage of laser printing vs. a number of inkjets. Does soy make a difference ?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is not inconceivable that soy toner would be less green when you figure in the energy costs of farming, the fact that stripped earth grawing a monocrop is far less effective at absorbing carbon than forest or grassland, the fact that fertilizer is made from natural gas, fact that the soy is like
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The pigment is
Re:Be Green (Score:5, Interesting)
All right Jimmy (Score:3, Insightful)
Mr. President you ought to know by now nobody is going to do that. The green economy is about feeling like you care without actually doing anything. It's about keeping your margins up and your expenses low.
Marketing!
Re:Be Green (Score:5, Funny)
That's right! If you want it to be "green", you have to use Organically Grown Soy so those horrible GMOs won't, uh, get on your paper and ... uh ... club the baby seals ... umm ...
Damn! Lost my place in the chapter about soy in my copy of "Liberal Rants for All Occasions." If only it wasn't printed on hemp paper, maybe we wouldn't have smoked the table of contents.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Em, or stop printing.
Re:Be Green (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you could explain the purpose of the woodchip mill at Eden, in the south east corner of Australia, then. Old growth forest is logged and then chipped in that mill and shipped to Japan to make paper. And i'm certain that's not the only place in the world where old growth forests are logged for paper production.
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It's a dying industry because it's not sustainable. However, there are new pulp mills planned. Gunns are currently (controversially) building one in Tasmania. And i believe there's a new one being planned for Victoria.
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Print on Rice Paper (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Print on Rice Paper (Score:4, Funny)
Use rice paper, then you can eat any extra printouts.
Soy Ink on Rice Paper? Eat your words!
I'd be concerned about the nutritional claims (Score:4, Funny)
Soy based toner cartridges are probably ok, but I'd want to see the nutritional composition clearly labeled so we can compare the carbohydrate content with other equipment, such as our roughage-based fax machine.
I think the Ford Model T had Bakelite components, which were made from processed soy protein. But relatively few owners took them apart and shook the components to get more mileage, iirc.
they suck... (Score:5, Informative)
initial printouts were as dark as conventional toners. they did not match the darkness of original oem carts but were ok with our HP remanufactured carts in quality with oem toner.
after 3-4 weeks we started to see fade. think thermal fax machine fading type fade. they dont last long with UV light exposure (basically sunlight hitting the laser printout). we've since stopped using em.
YMMV.
Re:they suck... (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, we got ours from :
http://www.lasermonksgreen.com/ [lasermonksgreen.com]
as noted in the FAQ the ink is easier to de-ink and recycle (cuz it comes off the paper easier) and yield is more since less ink sticks to the paper due to the high heat ability of soy inks. for temporary printing this is great. for offices - ok for some, not ok for others.
see here :
http://www.lasermonksgreen.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=66 [lasermonksgreen.com]
#
Simpler and less capital intensive in the de-inking process (recycling)
#
Higher yield - for many of the toner cartridges, soy ink yields 10% more pages
HTH.
Hey - cool feature (Score:4, Funny)
That is two solutions in one:
1 - any report becomes invisible after a while. I bet Arthur Andersen would have paid a fortune for that feature alone. Besides, anything thicker than an 1 inch when printed is redundant the moment it's sent to the print queue (I just made that up, but feels about right in my experience :-).
2 - the paper can be recycled. Maybe not as printer paper, but scrap. And folded paper planes look much nicer without print on them, I just don't know what soy toner does to the aero dynamics. I suggest a week long study to find out.
On the serious side, thanks. Fade is a feature worth avoiding..
Soylent Toner (Score:2, Funny)
I don't know about the print quality, but switching to rice paper made for a delicious combination.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Soylent toner is made from the dessicated bodies of people stupid enough to have been suckered into buying soy-based toner.
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
You're doing your job wrong (Score:5, Funny)
In fact, might as well let the workers stay home. It will boost morale and help the environment. Win win. They will leave with a confused look that means you can get back to your game of nethack.
Either that, or use it as an excuse to surf to slashdot during work hours. Which it appears is what you did.
See Newspaper and magazine print (Score:3, Insightful)
To be really green... (Score:2, Funny)
... don't replace the toner cartridge at all, and save toner, paper, power, and the manufacturing and disposal costs of the printer. If the managers really want to be green, they can avoid producing all that paperwork.
nothing green about a laser printer (Score:3, Informative)
The drum is made of selenium that usually winds in land fills. They make ozone like crazy and when we are done with them we toss them out. Soy based toner totally pointless.
Nope nothing green here move along.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The amount is minute (Score:5, Informative)
The selenium isn't the issue, just as the trace of mercury in CFLs isn't the issue, it's the wastefulness of putting the whole, nonbiodegradable thing into landfills.
Not carbon friendly (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Standard laser-printer toner is made up of tiny specs of carbon black and plastic. When you print with this toner, you're fixing carbon onto paper. Point out how green this is.
So that's how they make carbon credits!
Longevity and rub-off (Score:2, Interesting)
Will your documents be readable in 1 year, 5, 15? What about regularly handled documents in binders in humid environments- does it imprint the opposite page or rub off?
These seem like the prudent questions to be asking.
You gotta RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Those user testimonials are great! I like how all their users synchronized their postings! There are 3 on June 2nd from 11:32 to 11:34, 1 on June 5th, and 5 from June 20th from 12:30 to 12:31.
Hilarious...
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What's better is that they aren't talking about soy based toner - just a company that refills toner cartridges.
Wrong attitude! (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are you resisting pressure from managers? The more you push one way, the more they'll push back.
A far better approach to managing your managerial stakeholders is to say "Hey, that's a great idea! Let's do an experiment... let's change your cartridges to soy for a few months and see how they go!"
This way even if they don't work, you're seen as a listener rather than a roadblock.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're assuming that his managers will take responsibility if their project fails; while that's certainly possible I wouldn't count on it, particularly if your goal is to ingratiate yourself with those managers.
Sounds Great... (Score:5, Funny)
Green, greener, soy? (Score:5, Insightful)
It might be cool to have soy based toner in your printer, but the overall damage to the environment may be wider and larger. A lot of companies greenwash their products in order to widen their customer base.
The Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] article seems to have some answers. Moving away from petroleum is an advantage.
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So what's really the point?
Soy-based newspaper ink makes some sense, because it is basically made from soy and vegetable oil, making it renewable and demonstrably non-toxic. But where does the carbon in regular toners come from? Possibly even soy, since it is cheap... but t
Re:Green, greener, soy? (Score:4, Informative)
"We identified an approach to use soy resins and polymers formulated into use for toners for office printers, faxes and copy machines," says Bhima Vijayendran, Battelle researcher. The research trial converted soybean oil and protein to a polymer, which was then processed into flakes or powder and mixed with pigments to create the necessary color."
http://www.soynewuses.com/downloads/biobased/BiobasedSolutionsNov2007c.pdf [soynewuses.com][PDF]
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Integral cartridge vs separate drum and toner (Score:5, Informative)
You can improve on this dismal performance by getting a commercial recycling company to refill old cartridges for you, but after a couple of refills the drum is no longer as good as it was, and print quality starts to deteriorate (on the other hand, one drum may be able to print perhaps 50-60000 report printouts or similar.)
Many of the more heavy duty printers use separate toner tanks and drums. This is far more effective at the expense of requiring an IQ in excess of 100 to replace toner. The drum unit may last from around 20000 pages on smaller machines to, say, several hundred thousand on a Kyocera. In Xerox printers I've looked at, the actual toner may account for more than half of the toner tank mass.
Quite simply the best and most effective way to make your printing less environmentally offensive is to go over the entire estate, identify the older machines that use heavy cartridges with a short life, and scrap them. (this will piss off middle managers who probably have them on their desks, but then they wanted it in the first place.) Then do a little homework on actual needs and replace them with something more cost effective. Replacing individual printers with workgroup printers shared among 5-15 people (based on their workload) reduces the carbon footprint per page printed for more than anything else, and tinkering with toner won't be significant in comparison.
Hmmm, sushi (Score:4, Funny)
And the beauty is, if a cartridge springs a leak, you can always use the ink to dip your sushi in.
Fix the whole problem! (Score:4, Informative)
Recycling the whole consumable is possible: http://www.closetheloopusa.com/ [closetheloopusa.com] actually uses toner to make a wood substitute among other things. They have agreements with many of the printer manufacturers. The aim is zero waste to landfill, and eventually to make printer/photocopier consumables totally recyclable in the sense of returning the materials back to their manufacturers.
Uncle Bob. (Score:4, Insightful)
This slashdot posting really evoked similar feelings in me. Pressure from managers to switch to soy-based toners, in an attempt to be greener. There is no world in which this is reasonable. If we are headed for ecological destruction, this obviously will do nothing to ameliorate the result; it's meaningless feel good tripe. If the ecological Armageddon isn't coming, this sort of in-efficiency for the sake of PR and... well, feel good tripe will ruin the economy, and is a good example of the tortuous lack of sense that will haunt us until our death. We, humanity as a whole, seem incapable of approaching any significant rationally. Like John Connor, suddenly fear we aren't going to make it.
Concentrate on the big steps first (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of steps that should be prioritized over soy-based ink:
Once these steps are done (the company will profit from most of them), feel free to consider soy-based toner cartridges.
Eh... (Score:3, Informative)
Using GM based Soy is bad for us (Score:3, Interesting)
Have your managers watch "The Future of Food" (google it), and how thousands of North American farms are forced to grow genetically modified Soy crops instead of natural and varied food/plant species and they may realize that while it's greener, it's not necessarily the most moral or genetically diverse thing to be doing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there anything you can't do with Soy?
Make it taste good....
Re:What next? (Score:5, Informative)
When i worked as an offset litho printer, back in the early 90s, we used soya bean ink. It was good stuff - and, as far as i remember, gave off less chemical fumes than standard ink.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Soy Printers ? (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer soylent toner.
Re:Soy Printers ? (Score:4, Funny)
I prefer soylent toner.
FInally, a way to make clueless users productive!
This message (Score:4, Funny)
...is brought to you by Soylent red and Soylent yellow, high energy vegetable concentrates, and new, delicious, Soylent green. The miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How is it green? (Score:5, Informative)
Soy ink is made from a non-food soy that is distinctly different from "regular" soybeans. However, that is used for the oil in the ink, not the pigment, and there is no oil in toner. So it is questionable just what they are doing with that soy in "soy-based" toner.
In any case, back to the subject: you may be right about the soy crops, but the answer to that is simple: stop using Monsanto soy. That is not exactly rocket science.
And as for the Roundup, it needs to be sprayed directly on plants, in order to be absorbed and do its work. Roundup is biodegradable in the extreme: it is broken down into harmless naturally-occurring chemicals shortly after it contacts the soil. That is why so many people found Roundup to be so frustrating: it would kill all the weeds in their yard, but even before they were completely dead, new weeds would start popping up. Because any roundup that did not touch a weed disappeared within a couple of days.
I applaud your concern for the environment (and in particular the non-reproducing crop garbage that corporations have tried to pull), but you should do some research before willy-nilly pointing fingers.
Re:How is it green? (Score:5, Informative)
At an ag-educated guess, the black pigment for "soy-based toner" comes from burnt soybean *hulls*.
As to the phytoestrogens, some interesting reading that is backed by considerable research:
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/04birthdefects.htm [soyonlineservice.co.nz]
(Be aware that flaxseed meal has 3 to 4 TIMES as much phytoestrogen as soy, and is sufficient to be somewhat effective as a contraceptive, and to cause birth defects, when used in dog food.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention that many domesticated annuals don't reproduce well in the first place. For example, corn would likely die out in a decade or so if we didn't spend lots of time and effort g