Xerox gave a sneak peek Thursday at its cured gel ink for digital printers that works on a large variety of materials from foil to super-slick plastic to cardboard.
Xerox's cured gel ink
(Credit: Xerox)Xerox's ink, previewed at the print industry trade show Drupa in Germany, is aimed at taking a bite out of the estimated $400 billion offset printing market.
The cured gel ink, with its peanut butter-like consistency, is heated up and becomes a thick liquid, similar to motor oil. The liquid squeezes through the print heads and onto a printing surface, such as a piece of paper, foil or plastic. As the liquid cools, it reverts back to a peanut butter-like consistency and is then shot with a pulse of ultraviolet light to harden the ink.
"Today digital systems shine in many applications, while offset presses are selected for others. The ability to print on nearly any surface will bring a world of new applications within the reach of digital printers," Steve Hoover, director of the Xerox Research Center, said in a statement.
The ink is currently in the research mode and no timetable is available for when it may hit the market, said Bill McKee, a Xerox spokesman. But he noted: "When we introduce something at a commercial trade show, we're committed to offering it to the market."
Currently, the challenges in getting the cured gel ink to market comes down to having the ink react accordingly, no matter what type of surface it's printed on, whether it's a cardboard box or a glossy magazine, said Jim Larson, Xerox Inkjet program manager.
SEATTLE--Carbon offsets, energy efficiency credits, renewable energy certificates. The lexicon of the new, niche business world of brokering in greenhouse gases was spoken at the Discover Brilliant conference Monday. (It felt like being in Charlie Brown's classroom.)
Carbon markets have begun to boom over the past year, offering corporations options for offsetting their emissions by trading them with cleaner companies. Many proponents of carbon trading want laws to force businesses to clean up their act.
"As long as companies can dump carbon without paying, they will," said K.C. Golden, policy director of Climate Solutions, a nonprofit that advises businesses on renewable energy strategies.
Under Europe's mandatory carbon cap and trade system that took effect this year, companies are allowed to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. To make up for exceeding that level, businesses buy expensive credits from companies that release fewer carbons. Europe borrowed the idea from the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1990, which set up caps and trading for sulfur dioxide, which causes smog.
Carbon markets are set to take off here in 2009 once a cap-and-trade program comes into effect in 11 Northeastern states. California establishes its own system in 2011, and is setting up emissions trading with Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia.
Attempts to offset carbons spewed into the atmosphere are attractive for companies seeking to wash their hands of causing climate change. The trading might be lucrative where mandatory, especially for businesses that already emit few carbons.
"If you're a large emitter, emitting tens of millions of tons of carbon and each one of those tons is a $10 cost, there's a noticeable impact on your balance sheet--or it can be a noticeable plus if you can sell it," said Gordon Smith, EcoLands Director of the nonprofit Environmental Resources Trust.
PepsiCo bought in April the largest chunk of renewable energy certificates yet--500,000 terawatt hours worth--through the for-profit Sterling Planet, which also supplies green pricing programs to 43 utilities companies.
Critics, however, contend that carbon trading is a distracting shell game that lets companies dump some carbon in one place while supposedly removing it elsewhere--kind of like throwing trash out your car window on the way to volunteer at a beach clean-up.
Determining the effectiveness of these new markets is sure to get harder as they grow. The very concept of carbon trading is an abstraction upon an abstraction, sort of the way a hedge fund is. It's hard to visualize carbon in the air, unlike other environmental hazards, such as banned aerosol from hairsprays that would hiss in your face, or cigarette smoke.
Even the seemingly more concrete efforts to reduce carbons are hard to measure. Environmental Resources Trust, which creates a registry of emissions rather than a market for trading them, specializes in forestry credits. The goal is to get more trees in the ground to suck up carbon dioxide. Trees look lovely and may be easier to count than abstract emissions certificates, but measuring their effectiveness is not.
In 1899 economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen introduced the term Conspicuous Consumption to describe what he believed to be the evils of wealth accumulation in the nouveau riche upper class of the Gilded Age (Veblen was not exactly a "right wing" economist). You can best think of Conspicuous Consumption today as the notion that consumerism and "keeping up with the Joneses" drives economics.
One of my friends, Helen Priest from Meridian Energy, coined a new version of the term this week--conspicuous sustainability. She is here from New Zealand's largest (and all green) power company visiting Silicon Valley, and she's watching the torrent of activity around everything green and clean. It struck her that we are reinventing Conspicuous Consumption--keeping up with the Joneses in all things green. You have to wonder if solar panels or a LEEDs rating on a McMansion somehow doesn't miss the point.
So let's think: Al Gore's son gets arrested for doing 100 mph with marijuana in the car--in a Prius! (As I told one my friends, I didn't know they could go that fast.) Nouveau riche tech execs out here in Silicon Valley put ultraclean, and even more, ultraexpensive, solar power on their roofs. Buckingham Palace offsets the carbon footprint of the Queen's recent trip to the United States. Dell has Plant a Tree for Me Program, which I used when I bought a new Dell last month. There is an exponentially increasing number of examples of consumerism driving green.
But to be fair--conspicuous sustainability is pushing everything from the rapid growth in solar to the greening of corporate strategies like General Electric's Ecomagination, BP's Beyond Petroleum and General Motor's Live Green, Go Yellow. It's pushing hybrid electric sales, fuel cells to power our PDAs and carbon offsets--all good things for the environment.
I put the term to my friend, green business guru Joel Makower, and he quickly agreed that conspicuous sustainability is exactly the term for our age (We didn't discuss whether it was good or bad). Joel's response was, "I think the quintessential symbol for the conspicuous sustainability age would be the carbon-neutral Hummer." Or maybe Gore's carbon-neutral 10,000 (square foot) San Francisco home. He also said "And then there's Moskito, Richard Branson's privately owned Caribbean island, which he wants to be carbon neutral..."
In Veblen's mind, Conspicuous Consumption was a very bad thing, but for green tech and the environmental movement, is conspicuous sustainability a good one?
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