RP341 The End of Ink

 RP341 The End of Ink?

Suppose you had only a single math notebook for your entire school career, or could take yesterday's paper to a shop each morning and have it reprinted with today's news. Thanks to light-printable paper, such things might be possible very soon!
After years of effort, researchers in the United States and China have developed a remarkable chemical compound. When applied to ordinary paper, this compound makes the paper printable by ultraviolet (UV) light rather than ink. It looks and feels like any paper, but only keeps its text for 5 to 10 days. If you don't need the text for that long, heating the paper will erase it in 10 minutes. Either way, it can be printed on over 80 times with no loss of quality!
The benefits of such an invention are obvious. Newspapers, magazines, posters, notebooks, and supermarket product life labels are just a few of the many temporary information sources we use. Wouldn't it be great if we could keep on using them over and over again?
Then there are the environmental advantages. Paper production is a major source of pollution, and even recycling paper pollutes due to its ink removal process. In some countries, one third of all trees cut down are used for paper and cardboard. And where does all that paper end up? Mostly in landfills, where it accounts for 40 percent of dumped trash. The more we learn about reprintable paper, the more reason there is to love it!
For now, however, widespread use of this new technology is still just a dream. Although reprintable paper only costs about as much as ordinary paper, laser printers which can print it quickly don't exist yet. And since a blue pigment is one component of the light-printable compound, most UV printing is still either blue on white or white on blue. This means that only text and drawings can currently be reproduced using this method.
Nevertheless, UV printing is an exciting new development which we should all keep an eye on. Who knows? One day there might be an edition of this book which you can have reprinted after you've finished reading it!