Recently I had a chance to visit my father?s office (a reputed MNC in Oil & Gas Field). I saw a lot of environment friendly initiatives adopted by the Company to save our mother earth which includes very elaborated system of collecting used plastic bottles and papers to be sent for recycling purpose. But when I learnt that a huge amount of waste/used papers are sent for recycling each week from the office (2500 people work there), I am astonished. Recycling is a good thing, but not the best thing?The best is obviously reduce and then Re-use. I started searching on how we can at least re=use the papers generated at office.

One option is to insist all the employees to use both side of the papers all the times? But what about re=using the printed papers??

But today, technology has advanced such that we have 3-d printers that can create models of things that we would have to build before. I found out a new type of printer from Toshiba which is trying to make printers more eco-friendly. They have launched the E-Studio printer that can erase the ink on the existing paper and print on it again. It can reuse paper upto 5 times. It also doesn?t deteriorate the color of the paper.

This printer helps to reduce the CO2 emissions by over 60% and that is a huge amount of saving. How it manages to do this is very interesting. The printer uses a special toner whose color is removed by passing the paper through high temperature. The machine also has ability to sort paper into reusable and un-reusable sheets at the same time as removing the toner color, and to digitize the documents prior to erasing. Normally, documents that have been used, for example, at a meeting, are either filed away or scrapped, but with this system, the contents of the documents can be converted into digital data and saved for future use.

Technology is the king these days and we should all follow this kind of technological innovations as and when possible?