TCPglobal - news, views and issues on total cost of printing

Issue #0735/1 - When we discard a used single-piece toner cartridge or ink cartridge, do we think about how much waste we are creating or the quantity of the earth’s resources that were consumed in the making of that cartridge or how much energy will be consumed in processing that waste (if it gets processed at all) or the amount of money and waste we could have saved if we had made a wise hardware purchase?

Moving on from last week’s article, "How long will your printer last? Environmental impacts of hardware durability", we must recognise that longevity and durability is not restricted to the shell of the printer only.

Just as important are the moving parts and imaging elements of the printer.

Integrated print heads

Inkjet printers are largely configured either with integrated ink tank/print head or with long-lasting printhead with separate ink tank(s). Variations on the long-lasting print head configuration comprise those with replaceable heads and those with permanent units that are factory fitted with no user-replaceable element to them.

Individual ink tanks sitting
on a permanent print head

Lexmark sits exclusively in the first category, with integrated cartridges only, and Brother and Epson sit exclusively in the final category with fixed, long-life print heads only. Canon and Hewlett-Packard sit in both categories, with both configurations found in the product line-up, while Hewlett-Packard also has models based on both types of long-life print head – replaceable and permanent.

Individual ink tanks sitting off-
axis with permanent print head

Where laser printers (page printers) are concerned, the situation is similar. Some manufacturers use single-piece toner cartridges where the entire imaging system is contained within one unit, while others split the component parts down.

These components essentially comprise the toner cassette, the developing roller and the OPC (imaging) drum. There are configurations that either split all three elements apart or simply split off the toner cassette from the mechanical elements (developer roller and OPC drum) that are contained in an imaging unit. In some instances (more typical of colour laser printers) the developer roller and the toner are combined with a separate OPC drum.

Manufacturers (engine manufacturers) typically employing the single-piece design include (focusing on mono laser printers): Canon; Lexmark; Ricoh; and Fuji Xerox.

Those typically employing a two or three-piece configuration, but where some single-piece units can be found, include: Brother; Konica Minolta; Oki; and Sharp.

Lexmark is in the rare position of being a majority single-piece manufacturer with some printers that employ a multi-part configuration.

As we shall see later, Kyocera sits in a category of its own with an ultra long-life OPC drum configuration.

On the Total Cost of Printing issue, multi-part configurations could, at one time, be guaranteed to offer the user a lower Cost Per Page overall. This is no longer the situation as manufacturers have come to realise the power of marketing pages based on Cost Per Page and not on the cost of the consumables items with ink or toner.

Generally speaking, a the higher end of the market, mono laser printers use a single-piece toner cartridge with all the imaging elements contained within it because the drum is worked fairly hard and it would be difficult to guarantee the drum life much beyond the life of the toner contained in the cartridge (particularly at 32,000 pages per cartridge).

However, even here, there are significant environmental implications to following the long-life, multi-part, route – for the user as well as for the manufacturer and the planet.

As an example of the difference that long-life parts can make to both the environment and the cost of running printers, let’s look at a printer group that we’ve used recently for cost comparisons and consider the implications of running that printer over a much longer period than the typically accepted three years.

I recently learned of an early Kyocera ECOSYS printer that is still running after perhaps as much as 15 years of service, and is believed to have printed in excess of seven million pages!! Let’s apply that level of usage to the group of currently available printers and see what the result is (we’ll assume exactly 7m prints in 15 years).

At that level of usage, the printer has got through an average of 38,889 pages in each month of its life. As an ECOSYS printer, this machine will have needed 23 maintenance kits (at 300,000-page intervals) to replace the long-life imaging drum.

Each one of the models represented here for this class of printer has a maintenance kit, some invoked at the 300,000-page mark others at 200,000 or 250,000 pages. Only the Kyocera has an OPC drum that lasts this long. The other printers all employ a single-piece unit with varying yields.

Applying these figures to the current group of printers, the Kyocera FS-4000 would need the stated 23 maintenance kits, as would both of the Lexmark-built printers (Lexmark T644 and Dell 5310). In the case of the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4250, the life of the maintenance kit is 250,000 pages, so 27 changes would be required and the Xerox Phaser 4510 has a life of 200,000 pages, so 34 changes would be required.

Just at this level we can see the environmental significance of the impact of long-life components. Bizarrely, the cost of the 23 maintenance kits over 15 years for the Kyocera is almost double the cost of the 34 kits for the Xerox. However, that is not the point and we’ll see just how the impact of the expenditure shifts when we include the toner costs.

With the Xerox having a 19,000-page toner, the machine would require the purchase of 368 units in total over the 15 years in comparison to the Lexmark with its 32,000-page toner that would be changed only 219 times – a ratio of 1.7:1.

This means that for every 10 cartridges used in the Lexmark, 17 are used in the Xerox – 1.7 times the number of cartridges entering the waste ecosystem (hopefully for recycling); 1.7 times the quantity of packaging requiring disposal (assuming similar packaging between models); 1.7 times the number of lorry loads, lorry miles and cost of transportation to deliver the units; 1.7 times the manufacturing capacity required; 1.7 times the energy consumed in manufacture; and 1.7 times the carbon footprint, etc., etc.!

And that is just from the difference in toner yield from each cartridge!

Worse than this, it means 1.7 times number of OPC drums manufactured and requiring disposal and 1.7 times the number of developer rollers, etc., etc.

Thankfully, Xerox makes up for this poor performance with its solid ink printer range where there is a claimed saving in waste material of approximately 97% compared to a typical laser printer. Furthermore, there is a massive saving in energy consumption during manufacturing because of the hardware-free nature of solid ink consumables; massive savings in transportation costs, energy consumption, fuel emissions, etc., etc. from the much smaller size and lighter weight of the ink and packaging per 1,000 pages printed.

All-in-all, solid ink is by far the most environmentally friendly colour page printing solution (probably even more-so than liquid inkjet).

Back to laser solutions though, Kyocera’s printer, the FS-4000, has a toner cartridge that is actually one of the smaller units in the group, with a yield per cartridge of only 20,000 pages. The difference here is that this maintenance kit mentioned earlier IS the drum and the other major toner-related moving part, the developer roller – meaning that the only replenishment supply required is a toner cassette.

There are no OPC drums, no developer rollers and no other metal parts in the 350 toner cassettes that will be required in 15 years. In fact, the toner cassettes themselves are made of biodegradable plastic so, even if they do end up in landfill, as opposed to being ground down for recycling or as an energy source for electricity production, they do not represent a hazard to the environment.

Going one step further, because the toner cassettes do not include the mechanical parts of a traditional one-piece toner cartridge, they are smaller and lighter, meaning that they also benefit from all the reduced manufacturing costs, transportation costs and emissions mentioned with respect to solid ink – it is just that the savings are not as large as the savings from solid ink.

In the accompanying photos we can see the difference in composition between an ECOSYS toner cartridge and a regular single-piece toner cartridge. There are 65 individual parts to the regular cartridge in comparison to the 5 parts to the ECOSYS cartridge – a ratio of 13:1. If we only consider the time implications of breaking down the regular cartridge in order to recover parts that could be reused (e.g. screws) and separate out the parts that may be recycled from the parts that require other specialist attention, then the cost is huge against the cost of simply directing an entire cartridge in the right direction for shredding.

What we have to understand is that the 23 maintenance kits used in the Kyocera machine represents 23 OPC drums and it is this figure that has to be compared to the 368 OPC drums used in the Xerox. With this, we have to include all the arguments from last week’s article relating to the manufacturing process, the raw materials and energy used and the recycling or waste disposal implications.

It is this ratio – 368:23 or 16:1 - that indicates the enormity of the environmental savings achieved by the ECOSYS configuration. That is: only one OPC drum needing disposal after use in the ECOSYS model for every 16 OPC drums used in the Xerox.

Put this into monetary terms and we end up with a long-term saving on expenditure of 51% by using the environmentally conscious FS-4000 rather than the Phaser 4510.

Only Dell, with its aggressive marketing stance, takes the traditional single-piece toner cartridge model and does not charge the customer an arm and a leg for it but there is still no way that the Dell model can compete on cost with Kyocera.

However, this is not the point!! Dell customers are producing the same quantities of waste as the Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox customers even if they are paying less for the privilege.

To round off, environmental consciousness is not just the manufacturer’s responsibility. It lies with the user, the consumer, as well to buy responsibly. Let’s face it, when a 50% saving can be made on expenditure and up to a 16:1 saving on waste materials, surely it’s a “no-brainer”.

Additional information supplied by Kyocera indicates that recycling really is on the increase, with recycling of office hardware having doubled in about 15 years, but that the proportion of companies with a clear environmental policy has fallen from 54% to 41% in the period and that the proportion of companies that ‘diligently scrutinise suppliers for environmental credibility’ has fallen from 54% to just 20%.

Incredible that in an age of environmental awareness and climate change panic, there appears to be a massive desertion of environmental responsibility!

We must face the fact that something has to change. Estimates put the amount of electronic and electrical waste produced in a lifetime per capita in the western world at about 3.3 tonnes. In the UK alone, 1m tonnes of electrical and electronic waste goes into landfill every year.

Surely this can only increase as time goes on unless actions and attitudes change?

Current trends are just not responsible or sustainable. An estimated 1 billion people live below the poverty line, 2 billion lack safe water, 3.1 billion lack sanitation and millions of children live on rubbish dumps around the world.

And this when around 20% of the world’s population is in the developed world but they are responsible for:

• 80% of commercial energy use
• 75% of timber consumption
• 50% of fish and grain consumption
• 40% fresh water consumption

In 2005, the World Land Trust said that, “Almost 90% of all office printing and copier cartridges can be reused or recycled”.

Is this ever likely to happen?

Estimates issued by the Sustainable Design Award in 2004, indicate that if mankind continues at current consumption rates (of the earth’s resources), then we will need:

• 8.5 planets to absorb our carbon dioxide
• 6 planets-worth of steel
• 3.5 planets to sustain cement supply
• 3.5 planets to sustain timber demand

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 12:02 am and is filed under Environmental, Supplies, Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.