As much as 40 percent of the paper printed in an office is viewed once before being discarded, according to Xerox. A few years ago, its technologists began developing a self-erasing paper that can be reused a number of times and save your company a lot of money.

The product is still a few years from hitting the market, according to Patricia Calkins, Xerox’s vice president of environment, health and safety, and a speaker at GreenBiz.com’s upcoming conference, Greener By Design. Patricia recently joined GreenBiz Radio to talk about the company’s overall design approach, as well as how lifecycle analysis impacts product design.

Tilde Herrera: Hi, Patty. Welcome back to GreenBiz Radio.

Patricia Calkins: Oh, thanks, Tilde. It’s nice to be here.

TH: Now we’re going talk about the design and manufacturing process for Xerox, focusing on assembly and recycling. In general, can you give us an overview of how Xerox approaches design when it comes to families of products?

PC: Sure. Well, first of all, the way that Xerox focuses in on design is to think about the full lifecycle system of a product, and I’ll talk a little bit about what I mean in a minute.

And then we think about the primary impacts on the environment throughout that lifecycle of the product system. And then as we design future products, how do we reduce the most significant contributors? So let me give you sort of a simple example.

Back in the early ‘90s, we did a lifecycle analysis of a typical copier printer and the environmental impacts that are created by delivering the function that that delivers to our customers. And we found that of the overall environmental impact along its entire lifecycle -- from extracting the materials that need to go into making the parts, to making the parts, to assembling them, to the product being used by customers, to then what happens at the end of life, and it includes all the paper that’s used in the product and the cartridges.

What we found is the two primary contributors to overall environmental impact were energy during the machine use, and paper. So, what we did was start to focus our design for environmental initiatives on driving energy efficiency into our products. And then looking at the paper dimension of our products and how can we help reduce the use of paper through designing our products.

For example, to more effectively double sided print. What we found is that a lot of people didn’t want a double side print because it took longer to make one double-sided print than it took to make two single sided prints. So we actually had to redesign our products for what we call “duplex efficiency” so that it takes no longer to make one double-sided print than it takes to make two single sided prints anymore. Then to design the product so that they would more effectively take recycled content paper.

So again, what we found in the ‘90s was that our customers were experiencing an increase jams in products as they increased the volume of recycled content paper through the machines. And so we had to design the products to do more effectively take larger increased volumes of recycled content paper without increasing jams.

TH: And how did you do that?

PC: Well, we actually we had to design the products, the whole paper path, to have what we call “more latitude” for taking recycled content paper. One of the issues with recycled paper is as you recycle the paper fibers, they become shorter and shorter. So that means that the paper, when it goes through the printing process, generates more dust.

So, of course, as the dust accumulates in the mechanical moving parts, you have increasing potential for jams. So basically designing our product so that they could actually accept more dust and not have jams occur.

And then even looking at the design of the paper that we use and introducing new paper technologies, such as what we introduced about a year ago. I think it was in August of 2007 called our “high yield business paper.” Now this paper uses 90 percent of the tree versus traditional paper, which only uses 45 percent of the tree to manufacture. To manufacture it, it requires 18 percent less energy. It produces 76 percent less air emissions, 35 percent less water emissions.

So again, it has environmental benefits throughout the lifecycle of the paper. And then even more recently, if we think about just the printing technology, we now have in our research and development organization activity going on designing what we call our “erasable paper printing system,” which allows you to reuse paper. So the prints that come off of the printer, the image over a period of time will disappear.

We designed it originally so that the image would disappear over a period of about 24 hours. We got feedback from customers that they say they really like the idea of being able to reuse the paper, but they want the image to disappear when they want it to. So now we’re redesigning so that the customer can have that image disappear when they want to reuse the paper. But the paper can be reused up to 10 times. So, it saves the impact to the environment and not having to manufacture a whole bunch of paper.

So when we think about the design, we think about the full system and where the opportunities to reduce impact on the environment are and there are lots of different ways to do it.

TH: Now when you talk about this reusable paper, when it set about designing it, what were the core targets or desired attributes that this paper had to have?

PC: So, well, the first thing is that we had to be able to reuse it. So the paper needs to be robust enough to be able to go through the print device more than one time. Because the image itself would have to disappear and then be reimageable, the paper needs to have the attribute of having basically a treatment that allows an image to form and then, when exposed to UV light, will eventually disappear.

So those are some of the design parameters. What kinds of materials do you use that can generate a print, that the print will then disappear when it’s exposed to certain wavelengths of light? And then how do you design it so that it’s robust enough to be able to go through that mechanical process more than one time?

TH: How long did it take the company to develop this paper?

PC: Well, it’s a combination of both the hardware and the paper together. So the print process is different in the hardware, and the paper is different. I’m not quite sure when they started working on this concept. I mean, things that are in research -- people come up with neat ideas and then they explore whether they’re feasible and then they start to incubate them. And then eventually, if they make sense, they’ll commercialize them.

So it’s not clear as to when this began to gleam in somebody’s brain, but I think when we first started to talk about it, was about 18 months to two years ago. We’re still working in the technology development portion of the process and hope to start working on the commercialization soon.

TH: Without giving away your trade secrets, can you tell us how the company fulfilled these objectives for this particular product?

PC: Well, within Xerox, we’ve got a very, very strong innovative type culture as well as a very strong team culture. So when people come up with good ideas and then they bring others into the discussion, and in fact, we have two of our premiere research organizations that are working together on this. Our Xerox research center in Canada (is) working together with our Palo Alto research center in California on this concept that, you know, one of the technologists came up with, to say, “You know, can we actually make this happen -- develop the hardware as well as the paper materials that can work together to enable products that will allow paper to be reused?” If we think about it, from the environmental dimension, the hierarchy is to reduce, reuse and recycle. If we could reuse paper, that’s better than recycling it.

So working the systems approach of the materials from our research center in Canada, together with the hardware design portion of Palo Alto Research center, to make these ideas turn into reality. So to first put together a conceptual idea and then to see, which the next step was to say, “O.K. Can we demonstrate that we can actually do this?”

And so they demonstrate that, and then the next step is to say, “O.K. How do customers really feel about this? Is the market interested in this?” What we found is the market is extremely interested in it. And then the next challenge is, “How do we then develop the technology in the way that we can commercialize it?” which is sort of where we are right now.

TH: O.K. When do you think that you’re going be bringing this paper to market?

PC: Boy, that’s a really great question. We’re hoping within the next couple of years.

TH: O.K. Who did you test it out on?

PC: Well, we tested it with several customers, the concept, and demonstrated how the technology would work to see whether they felt there was viability to this sort of technology. Based on that feedback, first of all, we found out that there’s a lot of interest in it. Secondly, the sort of feedback that we got was, “Yeah, we really like this idea of reusable paper but we don’t want the image to just disappear on its own. We want to be able to decide when it’s going to disappear.”

So that means then our technologist have to go back in and do some more technology development to enable the deliberate erase of the image as opposed to the automatic erase, or I should say, the deliberate erase of the image, as opposed to the image just sort of disappearing on its own.

TH: Can you talk about what is on the horizon in terms of design for Xerox? What should we expect to see from the company in the next few years?

PC: Well, I think, Xerox recently over the past couple of years really revised or has taken our framework for environmental sustainability leadership to sort of the next plateau. We’ve identified four key planks that we’re really focusing in on from the entire value chain perspective, and those are climate change and energy. Protecting biodiversity and deforestation is the second one. The third one is preserving clean air and clean water, and the fourth one is waste prevention and management.

So the products and technologies and services that we will be coming out with over time will help drive improvements in those four key areas. So, you know, just stay on the lookout. We should have some really cool and new innovative things that come out in the future that will help not only reduce the impact within our own operations and the supply chain, but also deliver significant benefits to our customers’ environment.

TH: Well, this all sounds really exciting. Patty, thank you for joining us.

PC: Oh, thank you, Tilde. It was fun to talk about our initiatives.

Tilde Herrera is associate editor at GreenBiz.com.