Xerox Touts 'Greener' Printing Toner

Xerox on Wednesday said it plans to begin U.S. production next year of a new printing toner that requires less heat to seal to a page, which means the company can offer business and consumer printers that use less energy.

Called Ultra Low-Melt EA Toner, the product can cut overall power consumption of digital printing devices by as much as 30%. That's because 50% to 80% of a printer's total power use goes to generating the necessary heat to fuse the toner to the page.

The new low-melt toner can be fused to the page at temperatures as much as 45 degrees Fahrenheit less than toner currently being used in Xerox products, while producing the same image quality, according to Xerox.

"This was the most difficult toner design we ever worked on," Hadi Mahabadi, a Xerox VP and manager of Xerox Research Center of Canada, said in a statement. "We had to push the envelope to the limit to achieve lower melting temperature and higher gloss while keeping other performance the same as or better than current EA toner."

Scientists and engineers at Xerox and its partner company Fuji Xerox worked together in discovering the polyesters that could be combined with other toner ingredients, such as colored pigments and wax particles, to form the new toner. Xerox has applied for 35 patents related to the invention and has been granted 10.

Six 25,000-gallon tanks of the toner arrived this week at Xerox's Webster, N.Y., plant, where production of the new product is expected to begin next year. The new toner will be suitable for all future Xerox products, from desktop and high-end office printers to high-speed commercial color presses. The low-melt toner is currently being produced in Japan, where it's being used in the Xerox 700 Digital Color Press, introduced in May.

Xerox did not disclose how pricing for the new toner would compare with current prices.