On-site paper recycling

Here’s a novel piece of technology that Jessi Roedema forwarded to me.

It’s a paper recycling system designed for corporate/large-scale paper users. Rather than collecting, shredding, transporting and recycling, this system does it all, on-site turning used paper into new paper.

The PaperLab system takes printed sheets in, grinds them to a fine powder, removes the ink and presses them back into pristine sheets of paper at 14 pages per minute. It doesn’t use the costly bleach and water slurry system that “real” paper manufacturers use. They don’t talk a lot about the technology, but a recent patent may show what they’re using: https://www.google.com/patents/EP2664708A1 

For heavy paper users with serious security challenges this would solve the problem of transporting unshredded paper to a recycler as well as reducing the shredding and two-way transportation cost.  The technology is not small and it’s not cheap – ArsTechnica estimates the cost higher than $75K, no word regarding on-going consumables and power cost. They’ll go on sale in Japan in 2016, and presumably elsewhere later.

Here’s a link to the press release for more info. 
http://global.epson.com/newsroom/2015/news_20151201.html