Epson's PaperLab Takes Old Paper and Makes it New, All in Your Office

Meet the PaperLab, Epson's, and the world's, first foray into recycling directly in the office. The idea is simple: put paper in that you've finished with, the machine does its magic, and then clean paper is returned.

It's supposedly more efficient than sending it to your local municipality's recycling center and more secure than a paper shredder. The machine can recycle used A3 (about the US equivalent of tabloid-sized paper) and A4 (about the US equivalent of letter-sized paper) copy paper at a rate of about 14 A4 pages per minute.

The machine isn't limited to just the A4 size and thickness, either. Using a "dry process", a paper production system treatment that Epson believes has never been used before, the PaperLab can also print varying thicknesses, densities, colors, and even fragrance and flame resistance. These varieties can allow offices to print their own thick business cards, colorful presentations, or maybe even thin paper to trace over images with.

As for the exact details on how the PaperLab actually works, Epson is tight-lipped on their innovative product. What is known is that the process does need a small amount of water to, as Epson states, "maintain a certain level of humidity inside the system."

The procedure also occurs in three steps, fiberizing ,binding, and forming. The fiberizing step takes the waste paper back into its original fibers and removes the ink from them using a mechanism possibly patented by Epson and, as Ars Technica muses, some type of reusable solvent. The binding step takes the fibers and weaves them back together again to make the new paper. The binding solution is the key to creating all the different kinds of paper mentioned earlier. The forming step is the point where the paper can become as thick or as dense as programmed.

As PC World notes, due to the size of the machine at 8.5 feet wide, 3.9 feet deep, and almost 6 feet tall, the PaperLab isn't something that will likely fit in the home, but rather, in an office with a big storeroom. This also makes sense because most homes don't generate enough paper waste to merit such a machine.

Epson has not publicly stated the price of the machine, how much waste is needed to make the 14 pages, nor its energy consumption statistics, so it is hard to say now if the machine is truly sustainable. The data will be public once the PaperLab goes on sale in Japan in 2016. There will be a demonstration of a prototype at the Eco-Products 2015 conference in Tokyo, December 10-12.