What’s happening on the “green” technology front?

By Gail Nickel-Kailing on August 5th, 2008

From nanotech to human-powered printers, creativity on the green front is wide reaching!

CBC News recently touched on nanotechnology and the work Xerox Research Center of Canada is doing to develop new toners.

“A new type of toner used in printers and copiers significantly reduces the amount of energy used in toner manufacture and also roughly halves the amount of toner needed to print a page. Toner - fine black or coloured powder that gets bonded to the page during the printing process - used to be made by grinding larger pieces of material to dust. A nanotechnology technique called emulsion aggregation builds up toner particles out of molecules.

Developed at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada in Mississauga, Ont., emulsion aggregation is how the toner for most of Xerox’s colour office printers is made today, and the company plans to implement the method across its product line within five years, says Patricia Burns, laboratory manager for materials synthesis and characterization at XRCC.

Building up the particles this way uses 25 per cent less energy, she says, and because the particles are smaller, it takes half as much toner to print a page. Besides reducing energy consumption, this means less waste toner going into the garbage, Burns notes.”

On the other end of the spectrum, we have “human-powered technology.” Not only is PB Copy, a Surrey, BC, based business, running a RISO printer on “pedal power,” the company has replaced all their traditional fluorescent bulbs and ballasts with LEDs. The result? An electric bill that has dropped to less than 2/3 of previous charges and bulbs that never have to be changed.

Kevin LaHay, co-owner of PB Copy, explains how the company moved to bicycle power:

It started when my girlfriend wanted a treadmill and I wanted to get an exercise bike. I wondered if there was any way that I could generate electricity while getting fit. I’d heard that you could watch tv from peddling a bike, so when I found the apparatus, I wondered if there was anything at work I could power with it. So here we are, we have a RISO machine that draws about 600 watts, and with our solar and the bike, we can run it on 100% renewable resource power, completely off the grid.

Check out the article by Business in Surrey here>>