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Soy-Based Toner Cartridges?
Jon.Laslow writes "I'm getting a lot of pressure from managers to switch to soy-based toner cartridges for our laser printers because they are 'greener.' The problem is, the only information I can find on them is from sales pitches; and the reviews all seem to be user testimonials. Do you have any experience soy-based printing products? Did you have any issues with them, and how was the print quality?"
...and let us know.
To be honest, I hadn't even heard of this. This article says the very first cartridges just became available at the end of last year. Amazon has them but it looks they all come from one company (the one mentioned in the article I linked) and I couldn't find any reviews or comments. I did notice that as far as I can tell they are the only company selling soy based toner cartridges and they only sell them for HP right now - though I guess they plan to add others in the future. That may solve your issue right there though, unless you own the right printers.
Interestingly enough the link in TFA doesn't seem to point to a company that does anything other than refurbish and refill toner cartridges with regular toner. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see a thing about soy based toner. I'm sure someone will point me in the right direction on that if I'm mistaken.
So I'd be interested as well in hearing if anyone has actually used this yet, but unless it has been an immediate disaster it doesn't seem that enough time has passed to tell how well it is going to work.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
So, basically, they could create lickable sheets with that process? ... Makes the Rolling Stones tongue suddenly look completely different ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
On the first page of a google search for "soy-based laser toner" is a link to a Chicago Tribune article dated April 22. Check that out.
Is there anything you can't do with Soy?
Make it taste good....
Soy Ink? What a freaking joke! The total octopi, or whatever they get ink from, saved by Soy Ink, is truly insignificant.
If your company wants to be green, they need to buy recycled paper, or buy a sustainable forest, or replace all that horrid grass outside with natural prairie and woods.
When are people going to get that using "green" products is still producing consumer waste, and that if you want to truly make an impact, you need to ride your bike sometimes, or something!
Use rice paper, then you can eat any extra printouts.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Soy based toner cartridges are probably ok, but I'd want to see the nutritional composition clearly labeled so we can compare the carbohydrate content with other equipment, such as our roughage-based fax machine.
I think the Ford Model T had Bakelite components, which were made from processed soy protein. But relatively few owners took them apart and shook the components to get more mileage, iirc.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
initial printouts were as dark as conventional toners. they did not match the darkness of original oem carts but were ok with our HP remanufactured carts in quality with oem toner.
after 3-4 weeks we started to see fade. think thermal fax machine fading type fade. they dont last long with UV light exposure (basically sunlight hitting the laser printout). we've since stopped using em.
YMMV.
I don't know about the print quality, but switching to rice paper made for a delicious combination.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If managers are discussing this with you and you're following up, you're doing your job wrong. Deflect the question: mention that really the carbon wasted from one cartridge is really no more than used by running the computers for a week in a year, which is essentially equivalent to 2.5 Volkswagens per library of congress. Use units they understand. Then suggest they compensate by turning of the computers for one day a week, and really there's no reason to leave the lights on either. Yes we can help the environment. Change. Paradigm. Use words they understand.
In fact, might as well let the workers stay home. It will boost morale and help the environment. Win win. They will leave with a confused look that means you can get back to your game of nethack.
Either that, or use it as an excuse to surf to slashdot during work hours. Which it appears is what you did.
Qxe4
From what I've read, soy-based printer toner/ink isn't that much different. The quality is likely to be less rich (especially for high end prints of brochures on regular paper) but otherwise there shouldn't be too much of a difference.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
... don't replace the toner cartridge at all, and save toner, paper, power, and the manufacturing and disposal costs of the printer. If the managers really want to be green, they can avoid producing all that paperwork.
The drum is made of selenium that usually winds in land fills. They make ozone like crazy and when we are done with them we toss them out. Soy based toner totally pointless.
Nope nothing green here move along.
Linux modi 2.6.26-2-parisc
Standard laser-printer toner is made up of tiny specs of carbon black and plastic. When you print with this toner, you're fixing carbon onto paper. Point out how green this is.
Mr. President you ought to know by now nobody is going to do that. The green economy is about feeling like you care without actually doing anything. It's about keeping your margins up and your expenses low.
Marketing!
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Will your documents be readable in 1 year, 5, 15? What about regularly handled documents in binders in humid environments- does it imprint the opposite page or rub off?
These seem like the prudent questions to be asking.
Those user testimonials are great! I like how all their users synchronized their postings! There are 3 on June 2nd from 11:32 to 11:34, 1 on June 5th, and 5 from June 20th from 12:30 to 12:31.
Hilarious...
When i worked as an offset litho printer, back in the early 90s, we used soya bean ink. It was good stuff - and, as far as i remember, gave off less chemical fumes than standard ink.
Why are you resisting pressure from managers? The more you push one way, the more they'll push back.
A far better approach to managing your managerial stakeholders is to say "Hey, that's a great idea! Let's do an experiment... let's change your cartridges to soy for a few months and see how they go!"
This way even if they don't work, you're seen as a listener rather than a roadblock.
Let me get this straight...
You build an extremely precise little box out of highly refined metals, circuit boards and PCBs, manufactured from parts made all around the world before being shipped thousands of miles to your local Staples, and you're worried about the half ounce of INK!?!?!
That's like cuttng calories by skipping the cherry on your triple scoop ice cream sundae!
Want to go green? Use CFLs. Replace your shower heads. Bike to work. Email instead of printing. Open windows rather than hit the thermostat. Use GotoMeeting rather than fly. Plant some trees on the South side of your home and office buildings. Buy your food from a local Farmer's Market rather than the mega-mart to avoid 'fresh' food from Argentina or some other place 4,000 miles away in refrigerated containers.
When the ink jet containers themselves are made of soy, and the mfgs standardize their cartridges so that reuse is more feasible, I'll take notice. Otherwise, this flavor of 'green' is idotic.
Buy Soy ink because it's better, lasts longer, or is cheaper and don't delude yourself with false green.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If you print a lot of green shit. Otherwise I would recommend that you buy cartridges with normal amounts of each color.
I prefer soylent toner.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Soy doesn't necessarily make the product green. Where is the soy produced, is it genetically modified, what's the carbon imprint of the whole product? How much processing does the soy need to become ink-like, and what chemicals are used along the way?
It might be cool to have soy based toner in your printer, but the overall damage to the environment may be wider and larger. A lot of companies greenwash their products in order to widen their customer base.
The Wikipedia article seems to have some answers. Moving away from petroleum is an advantage.
That is two solutions in one:
1 - any report becomes invisible after a while. I bet Arthur Andersen would have paid a fortune for that feature alone. Besides, anything thicker than an 1 inch when printed is redundant the moment it's sent to the print queue (I just made that up, but feels about right in my experience :-).
2 - the paper can be recycled. Maybe not as printer paper, but scrap. And folded paper planes look much nicer without print on them, I just don't know what soy toner does to the aero dynamics. I suggest a week long study to find out.
On the serious side, thanks. Fade is a feature worth avoiding..
Insert
...is brought to you by Soylent red and Soylent yellow, high energy vegetable concentrates, and new, delicious, Soylent green. The miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world.
You are misinformed.
Soy ink is made from a non-food soy that is distinctly different from "regular" soybeans. However, that is used for the oil in the ink, not the pigment, and there is no oil in toner. So it is questionable just what they are doing with that soy in "soy-based" toner.
In any case, back to the subject: you may be right about the soy crops, but the answer to that is simple: stop using Monsanto soy. That is not exactly rocket science.
And as for the Roundup, it needs to be sprayed directly on plants, in order to be absorbed and do its work. Roundup is biodegradable in the extreme: it is broken down into harmless naturally-occurring chemicals shortly after it contacts the soil. That is why so many people found Roundup to be so frustrating: it would kill all the weeds in their yard, but even before they were completely dead, new weeds would start popping up. Because any roundup that did not touch a weed disappeared within a couple of days.
I applaud your concern for the environment (and in particular the non-reproducing crop garbage that corporations have tried to pull), but you should do some research before willy-nilly pointing fingers.
At an ag-educated guess, the black pigment for "soy-based toner" comes from burnt soybean *hulls*.
As to the phytoestrogens, some interesting reading that is backed by considerable research:
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/04birthdefects.htm
(Be aware that flaxseed meal has 3 to 4 TIMES as much phytoestrogen as soy, and is sufficient to be somewhat effective as a contraceptive, and to cause birth defects, when used in dog food.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
While crop seed companies definitely want to keep selling new seeds each year, it's not exactly some evil plan. The high-yield, high-resilience hybrids typically lose many of their benefits in the second generation, and not particularly by design (it's a nice side effect, but it wasn't something seed companies engineered).
Not to mention that many domesticated annuals don't reproduce well in the first place. For example, corn would likely die out in a decade or so if we didn't spend lots of time and effort getting to to seed. And that's not some recent change due to big agribusiness, it's the result of thousands of years of genetic manipulation.
I'm not saying big agribusiness doesn't do some nasty things, but the fact that they sell annual, domesticated crops that don't breed well is not the thing I'd use to point out their harm.
You can improve on this dismal performance by getting a commercial recycling company to refill old cartridges for you, but after a couple of refills the drum is no longer as good as it was, and print quality starts to deteriorate (on the other hand, one drum may be able to print perhaps 50-60000 report printouts or similar.)
Many of the more heavy duty printers use separate toner tanks and drums. This is far more effective at the expense of requiring an IQ in excess of 100 to replace toner. The drum unit may last from around 20000 pages on smaller machines to, say, several hundred thousand on a Kyocera. In Xerox printers I've looked at, the actual toner may account for more than half of the toner tank mass.
Quite simply the best and most effective way to make your printing less environmentally offensive is to go over the entire estate, identify the older machines that use heavy cartridges with a short life, and scrap them. (this will piss off middle managers who probably have them on their desks, but then they wanted it in the first place.) Then do a little homework on actual needs and replace them with something more cost effective. Replacing individual printers with workgroup printers shared among 5-15 people (based on their workload) reduces the carbon footprint per page printed for more than anything else, and tinkering with toner won't be significant in comparison.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
People!
And the beauty is, if a cartridge springs a leak, you can always use the ink to dip your sushi in.
Recycling the whole consumable is possible: http://www.closetheloopusa.com/ actually uses toner to make a wood substitute among other things. They have agreements with many of the printer manufacturers. The aim is zero waste to landfill, and eventually to make printer/photocopier consumables totally recyclable in the sense of returning the materials back to their manufacturers.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Do you remember the scene in Terminator 2, where young John Connor is speaking with his cyborg protector in Mexico, and they look over to see two kids playing a shoot-em-up game with guns? John says, after a flash of pessimistic insight, "We're not going to make it, are we? Humanity, I mean?" (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
This slashdot posting really evoked similar feelings in me. Pressure from managers to switch to soy-based toners, in an attempt to be greener. There is no world in which this is reasonable. If we are headed for ecological destruction, this obviously will do nothing to ameliorate the result; it's meaningless feel good tripe. If the ecological Armageddon isn't coming, this sort of in-efficiency for the sake of PR and... well, feel good tripe will ruin the economy, and is a good example of the tortuous lack of sense that will haunt us until our death. We, humanity as a whole, seem incapable of approaching any significant rationally. Like John Connor, suddenly fear we aren't going to make it.
The selenium isn't the issue, just as the trace of mercury in CFLs isn't the issue, it's the wastefulness of putting the whole, nonbiodegradable thing into landfills.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Soy Green Toner is people!
We've got to stop them somehow!
There are plenty of steps that should be prioritized over soy-based ink:
Once these steps are done (the company will profit from most of them), feel free to consider soy-based toner cartridges.
Stop the brainwash
We tried this at my workplace and initial print quality seemed okay but the price was prohibitive compared to any perceived benefit. We didn't use them long enough to encounter any printout degradation like the anon above reported. A much better approach is to reduce printing overall to save paper.
No statement is true, not even this one.
I prefer soylent toner.
FInally, a way to make clueless users productive!
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
like someone else said, a waist of good oxygen.
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Or do you really think we can get somewhere without taking one step at a time?
Actually, most geeks are under the faith-based assumption that at some point, this is entirely possible. That Transporter Pads or Jump Drives or simple Teleportation is merely a question of time. It is so inculcated our geek culture that certain things will simply come easy once the elegant solution appears, as if by magic. Further, I think it affects how we view most problems.
Take environmentalism. Clearly the solution is greener products; things that will fit into a sustainable economy. But it's a binary clause; if your entire product can be green, then it should be. Otherwise, who are you fooling!? There is no sense of bootstrapping, of having to replace pieces as you can.
The subset of the culture that subscribes heavily to this stance tends to be against refactoring code, and for simply writing programs wholesale by themselves in their attic. They're against good test procedures and using older technologies because they're not shiny enough. Ironically, they're also the sorts who probably haven't written their own libraries - or even approached the idea. They buy most of their stuff, because whatever their realm of expertise, it's limited in scope. Fix plumbing? Hell no! Drill something, or saw something? What is the point - something you pay for is clearly going to be better, and in the end that arbitrary sense of idealistic quality is all that matters.
I hope that as we move forward we get more geeks like you, value_added, who recognize that it's not about suddenly being in Nirvana. It's about constantly changing the little bits that are pain points once any better solution becomes available, rather than holding out for some mythical day brought about in some opaque fashion wherein everything is just right of it's own accord.
In the end it's simple economics; the time-value of progress suggests that a little 'money' or 'value' now, and a little later, and a little later will yield a total greater value than a simple lump sum at the end.
[Ego]out
Have your managers watch "The Future of Food" (google it), and how thousands of North American farms are forced to grow genetically modified Soy crops instead of natural and varied food/plant species and they may realize that while it's greener, it's not necessarily the most moral or genetically diverse thing to be doing.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.