Laser Printers 'wasteful'

The Sun Herald

Saturday July 3, 1993

David Frith

LASER printers - the kind that are usually attached to personal computer networks - are the most environmentally wasteful products in the modern office, according to a new Australian study.

Every time most printers run out of toner - the black powdery substance which the printer uses to print text and images on to paper - their owners throw away a plastic cartridge which holds not only toner but also most of the printer's important mechanical parts, including the vital print drum.

Everything has to be replaced every time - at a cost of up to $450 a cartridge. Many business printers need a new cartridge every few weeks.

"It's like tossing out your car's engine every time you need to fill up with petrol," says Cliff Smith, managing director of Kyocera Electronics Australia, a major maker of laser printers - and the only one in which you don't throw away the cartridge.

More than 1.2 million toner cartridges, each about the size of a shoebox and containing plastics, rubber, aluminium, foam, brass and copper, are thrown out in Australia every year, leading to a growing disposal problem.

Most end up as landfill. Incineration of others requires expensive scrubbing systems to prevent emissions of dioxins and other contaminants.

It's an exercise in waste and futility probably unparalleled in any other industry, and it is costing Australian business and government offices hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet most of this expenditure is unnecessary, according to a study commissioned by Kyocera.

Less wasteful printers are not only more environmentally friendly, but can save business users more than $20,000 over the typical four-year life cycle of a laser printer, the study says.

Contrary to a general belief, the more environmentally sensitive features a printer contains, the cheaper it is to run, the report says.

The study of 360 laser printers sold on the Australian market, titled The Thin Green Line, was carried out by the independent Sydney-based International Research Bureau.

Its results, claimed to form the most extensive analysis of office printers in Australia, were released last week.

The report stresses the point that purchase price is only one small part of the cost of owning a laser printer.

If you spend about $5,000 on a conventional laser printer - about average for a business house - your total outlay over the four years can run to almost$20,000, the report says.

Consumables, including toner, print drum and developer, account for 62 per cent of this. Initial purchase cost takes up only 24pc; on-site service 8.4pc; paper 4pc; and power 1.3pc.

In the 8-10 page per minute printer market, the largest volume sector, the printer compared four-year running costs for five top-sellers: Apple Pro 600, Canon LBP-IV, Hewlett-Packard 4M, Kyocera Ecosys 1500 and Lexmark 10R.

To few people's surprise, the IRB report shows that the client which commissioned it, Kyocera, romped home as cheapest and greenest printer at$10,259 over the four years.

The closest competitor, according to the report, is the Lexmark at $14,332. Then come the HP LaserJet ($16,515), Apple ($16,927) and Canon ($16,958).

In the high-performance 11-20 page-per-minute network printer market, the savings were even bigger.

Kyocera gets its good results because, alone among these printers, it does not have a throw-away cartridge. The company's patented long-life "amorphous silicon drum" is claimed to not need replacing under normal circumstances.

It's the only one of its type. Users simply top up the toner from time to time.

The cost is about 1.5 cents a page, according to the IRB report. All other makes cost 3.7 to 5.7c a page.