Reusable paper is one innovation that Xerox will never sell for a pittance.
One morning in 2006, a group of scientists arrived early for work at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada, in Mississauga on the shores of Lake Ontario.
There was a nervous excitement in the air as they crowded round a table on which lay a single sheet of paper. Hushed silence gave way to cheers and high-fives as the scientists saw that the sheet was completely blank. “That was a pretty special moment,” says research centre manager Paul Smith.
After three years of research and development, the team had perfected erasable paper, the holy grail of sustainability. The previous evening, the sheet had been a typical, text-heavy office document – albeit one produced by a specially modified printer. Within 16 hours it had wiped itself clean, ready to be printed on again an unlimited number of times. Having first revolutionised the office in 1947, with the invention of the photocopier, Xerox is poised to do it again.
More than two trillion pieces of paper are recycled every year in office environments. Xerox’s new paper, and associated printer, could drastically reduce the number of trees felled to make virgin paper as well as saving on power usage: reprinting uses a fraction of the energy that recycling does.
The road to erasable paper started with a desire to understand how the mountains of paper consumed in offices were actually used. When Xerox categorised the contents of the Mississauga centre’s recycling bins, it found that 40% of printed paper is ‘transient’. “People put things in the recycling bin one day, and print the same thing out again the next,” says Smith. “It’s easier to find information electronically than to find the piece of paper again.” Printed emails, web pages, reference materials viewed only once and – the worst offenders – cover pages are all wasteful. “Cover pages are used for a fraction of a second. You can reuse that paper immediately. We knew we could make that happen, but it required a totally different printer concept. You can’t use conventional ink or toner because you can’t get them off the paper again,” says Smith.
His team developed photochromic compounds in paper that absorb light to display an image, but only hold the light for a limited amount of time. The technology is similar to that used in photo-sensitive sunglass lenses. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre in California then had to develop a printer that uses a light-emitting bar to print with the exact wavelength of light required to react successfully with the compound. The result is paper which wipes clean in 16-24 hours but will probably cost at least twice as as much as regular copier paper. The printer – which can manually erase the contents of the paper and print on it straight away if required – is a slightly modified version of a regular model. Xerox is investigating how quickly it can bring both paper and printer to the marketplace.
| Xerox profits per share in 2007 |
US cents |
| First quarter |
 24 |
| Second quarter |
28 |
| Third quarter |
27 |
| Fourth quarter |
41 |
Innovation and strong product design are, Smith says, Xerox’s lifeblood: “Xerox was born through innovation – the invention of xerography – so there is an internal belief that innovation is vital to the company’s health.” Xerox hasn’t always been as healthy. Apple boss Steve Jobs said, in 1996, that Xerox could have “owned the entire computer industry today”. He should know. When Palo Alto invented the PC, laser printer and Ethernet in 1979, Xerox sold the technology to Jobs for a song, believing the paperless office was incompatible with its core business. Existing patents were allowed to run out, allowing rivals to gain a foothold in the copier market, and many of the company’s best scientists followed the PC technology to Apple.
By 2000, the 102-year-old company was $19bn in debt. Incoming CEO Anne Mulcahy soon recognised that raising R&D’s profile was central to the company’s recovery. Today, every designer and scientist at Xerox averages two ‘invention proposals’ a year, put before a technical advisory panel of their peers that marks them for feasibility. The corporate side of the business is only involved further down the line, says Smith, to ensure innovation flourishes unhindered. “There are mechanisms for rewarding people who have ideas,” he says. “But in reality we just employ people who love inventing.”
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 4, Summer 2008
You can read more about the Xerox approach to design and innovation in our case study.