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Ricoh is Planning Fifty Years into the Future

Where does environmental concern by business begin? Obviously when black soot is billowing out of smokestacks and the community is in an uproar most corporate entities will take action. But that kind of after the fact adjustment will not reduce our carbon footprint. Saving energy is the most direct route in existence towards reducing greenhouse emissions. Use less juice and we use less fuel to make that juice. Burn less fuel and we send less pollution into our atmosphere. For over twenty years m

March 25, 2009 5 min read 0

The solution is to take one giant step further with new designs that plan for a green future. One such idea in the making is Ricoh’s quick warm up copier. While most office copy systems require a lengthy nonproductive warm up time the new Ricoh models are ready to run in under ten seconds. This allows the machine to be “at rest” in energy-saver mode yet come quickly to life resulting in an overall power usage savings of almost 50%.

This savings pales in comparison to Ricoh’s rewriteable paper system. Perhaps you remember as a child writing secret messages with lemon or potato juice on paper. No one could read the message unless they knew to warm the note over an incandescent light bulb. Once heated slightly the top secret magically appeared. Now consider that Ricoh has developed an image printing and erasing system that uses heat in the same manner to write on a sheet and erase it up to 200 times. While the process itself uses some energy, that use is minute compared to the energy used to produce a sheet of paper. This is the ultimate form of paper recycling. Point of use recycling saves energy so definitively that business costs for items such as copy making can be cut by as much as 90%. This does not even factor the submerged labor costs of purchasing and delivery of paper supplies.

As companies such as Ricoh continue to develop these ubergreen technologies everyone on earth will delight in maintaining a high quality of life and convenience without sacrificing environmental comfort. Ricoh should be commended further for their overall eco-strategy that is based on a year 2050 long-term environmental vision. This planning embraces energy conservation, resource conservation, pollution prevention and reduction of paper use entirely.

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