Soy Bean Toner Cartridges

It turns out the US currently uses over 100 million cartridges per year. To produce that amount of cartridges, 100 million pounds or 50,000 tons of oil must be processed. That means high-volume energy consumption and tons of landfill afterwards.

In an effort to reduce this tremendous amount of nature’s raw materials, PRC Technologies, a division of Print Recovery Concepts Inc., announced a real environmental breakthrough. PRC has developed a way to make toner powder out of soybeans.

The company says soy toner is absolutely harmless to the printers. Just as harmless as it is for humans

Via TCD blog

How to Detect and Fix Problems with Laser Monochrome Printing.

Greetings again!

I'm writing to let you know I just published final part of a big article titled "How to Detect and Fix Problems with Laser Monochrome Printing." If you ever asked 'What the heck?' seeing a printed page coming out all in stripes or just dirty? In the article you can find the solution to this and other problems with toner cartridges.

Toshiba Recycles Your Toner Right on the Spot

If you own a laser printer and ever did an online shopping for printer toner cartridges, you, probably, noticed here and there a waste bottles being sold along with consumables. These very bottles are where unused tone is utilized when not applied to form image. That happens because of mechanism of laser printing is not perfect and yet to be optimized.

Toshiba intends to eliminate this embarrassing flaw. The company is implementing its recyclable toner technology into more MFP machines. The technology allows collecting waste toner that is not applied to the page and feeding it back into printer cartridge, so it can be used over again.

The technology is supposed to solve environmental problems caused by disposing of waste toner. On the other hand, it would increase cost-effectiveness of toner cartridge, since more pages per cartridge could be printed.

For now, the system works only with mono printers, however “it will take a bit longer to introduce it to colour machines as it needs a different mechanical approach, but ultimately we aim to introduce it there too,” says Jamie Mackenzie, Product Manager at Toshiba.

How Toner Is Used in Printers

Surfing the net today, I came cross a thread where they discussed whether a laser printer uses equal amount of toner regardless of each print density, or not. That probably happens in laser printer cartridges with magnetized toner pickup rod, but not likely. The truth is the printer uses toner according to actual print density. And the amount of pages that can be printed is calculated based on an average of 15% print density of an 8 x 11 inch paper. Also, it seems like laser printers and photocopiers using toner all have recovery mechanisms which transfers unused toner back into the reservoir.