COP28 has revealed that much more needs to be done if we are to limit global warming to 1.5°C before the end of the decade. Notably, the first ‘global stocktake’ of the world’s efforts to address climate change under the Paris Agreement has shown that progress is too slow across all areas of climate action. Here, some of the sector’s leading vendors discuss strategies and initiatives designed to reduce the environmental impact of printers and MFPs
PrintIT Reseller: How are you supporting the circular economy and reducing the carbon cost of acquiring printing devices? Think remanufactured devices and/or those which contain recycled content, consumables recycling/remanufacturing, or keeping products in use for longer with extended warranties etc.?
Steve Pearce: Our groundbreaking move was to launch all of our print devices carbon neutral out of the box. That’s the device itself, its transportation and five years’ worth of genuine consumables.
Therefore, alongside our UK-based toner recycling scheme and our hardware device recycling program, we have developed a market-leading circular proposition for our customers. In fact, to date, we have placed over 5,000 of these devices into the UK. We have also reforested over 14,000 trees in the UK to offset print usage, for scale that’s a native woodland approximately the size of four football pitches, which I am personally incredibly proud to boast. To prolong device life as a greener play, we have also offered extended warranties and actively promote genuine toner usage.
Ben Mills: Konica Minolta aims to use more than 90% circulated resources for its products by 2050. These resources are recycled materials and biomaterials. With that goal in mind, the company aims to enable the reuse and recycling of materials as many times as possible to minimise waste and the consumption of natural resources. Currently, our MFPs already use up to 44% and the production printing systems up to 15% recycled materials. Toner bottles use up to 61% recycled materials.
As part of our efforts to reduce our own environmental impact, in the UK we offer a consumable recycling programme called ‘A World on Loan’. It provides a simple process to return used Konica Minolta consumables (including toner bottles, cartridges, and imaging units), for recycling, and accompanies our full range of office and production print systems. 100% of the returned material are recycled and recovered into raw materials for other industrial uses. We also provide documentation to meet our customer recycling targets.
Proud of its product reliability, Konica Minolta has avoided the temptation to sacrifice build quality to gain a competitive price advantage. One of the benefits of this reliability
is additional life, both in terms of less frequent replacement of machines on customer sites, and also a second user opportunity, as devices are refurbished and returned to the marketplace.
As Konica Minolta has a rich heritage in product excellence, customers can select a refurbished device with confidence, knowing they are not only saving money but retaining reliability.
Richard Wells: It’s really important to emphasise here the significant reduction in energy and consumables of heat-free inkjet printing compared with laser printing technology, benefits we are helping our partners calculate to the number in our Optimisation Report.
Epson has been the pioneer of the inkjet market for decades as demonstrated through the continued investment into new inkjet printhead factories and the extension of our MFP portfolio that now firmly addresses the printing mid-market, momentum the channel can only expect to continue.
The circular economy of printing is core to our product development strategy, and in November 2023 we announced new business printer warranties and parts replacement that guarantee the serviceable life of heat- free inkjet devices for up to eight years.
Stuart Miller: Becoming a circular business, in which every single product and material is designed, created, reused, repaired, and recycled to be kept in use for longer and to minimise waste to landfill, is at the heart of Canon’s sustainability goals.
Our Certified Used (CU) refurbishment scheme is an in-house, integrated programme that refurbishes existing hardware and components, thereby reducing total environmental impact over the long-term and contributing to the circular economy. The process for refurbishing involves anything from running a few simple tests to undertaking a thorough clean-up and rebuild of the product. Unlike second- hand products, refurbished goods are tested to ensure that they perform and function properly.
In terms of consumables, Canon’s ink cartridge recycling programme provides customers with a free, easy and environmentally responsible way to recycle empty Canon cartridges. Each element of every returned cartridge is reused or recycled – be it as a component in a new cartridge, as a base material in other industries, or as a substitute for fossil fuels.
Another consumable that will drive innovation when it comes to sustainability in the printing industry is paper. Canon is the first manufacturer to offer carbon neutral wide-format papers, having launched the Red Label Zero and Recycled White Zero last year. These papers, designed to be a game- changer for the AECM industry, are EU Ecolabel certified, meaning they have guaranteed, independently verified, low environmental impact throughout their entire lifecycle.
Will Armington: Xerox dedicates an entire section of our annual CSR report to our circular economy culture and current activities. Since 1959 – long before the term ‘circular economy’ became popular – remanufacturing has been embedded in our products’ DNA. At Xerox, we have long believed manufacturing, operations, offices, and facilities can become waste-free workplaces. Our products are designed to enable environmental responsibility by selectively choosing parts. They are designed for efficiency in operation and to extend the life of parts through reuse in manufacturing. Our products are designed with reuse and recycling in mind, and our Design for Sustainability requirement is intended to ensure that 100% of our products are assessed against these criteria during product development.
Equipment returns are evaluated for potential reuse. Based on the condition and market demands, equipment may undergo an extended maintenance and verification process to return it to a high standard before redeploying it. In 2022, approximately 44% of machines returned in the US were sold as used or sent for remanufacturing. This approach requires the least reprocessing, transportation, and energy usage. Product families are designed with a high level of commonality to maximise reuse. This allows us to remanufacture parts to ‘like new’ performance specifications while reusing up to 95% of the machine components by weight without compromising quality or performance. Globally, in 2022, we remanufactured approximately 13,830 office devices, which resulted in the diversion of 5,900 metric tons of electronic devices and components from landfills or other forms of uncontrolled disposal.
Starting over 30 years ago with the 5090-product family of Xerox products, we have kept toner cartridges out of landfills thanks to our remanufacturing process, which recovers cartridges and waste toner for reuse. In 2022, more than 1.65 million Xerox toner Cartridges were manufactured using recovered cartridges, representing as much as 60% of toner cartridge production, depending on the cartridge family.
Spent toner cartridges are unboxed, assessed for damage, disassembled, cleaned, inspected, and packaged for shipment to our offices. The toner collected from spent cartridges is used for colour additives or returned to us for reprocessing. If items are unsuitable for remanufacturing, they are recycled or recovered through energy from waste. Recycled waste toner and toner reclaimed from manufacturing that qualifies for reuse may account for
25% of the new toner’s weight without compromising toner functionality.
Andrew Ellis, Director, PCL Direct: We have established partnerships
with 140 UK dealers, who supply us with machines they cannot refurbish themselves and would otherwise dispose of. We offer a fuel-efficient collection service, to avoid dealers travelling from all over the country to deliver their old machines to us directly. Our re-manufacturing takes place in Nuneaton, so it is centrally placed.
We provide dealers with a range of re-engineered mid to high volume MFPs, under our Eco Direct brand, which are upcycled from machines, from manufacturers such as Konica Minolta, that are, typically, no more than three years old and, preferably, with print volumes under 300,000 prints.
The range has been positively accepted as it has opened up more opportunities for dealers and to their customers.
To date, we’ve refurbished just over 500 machines and, this year, we’re aiming to broaden the range with remanufactured Ricoh and Canon devices and investigating Kyocera and UTAX models to offer a wider range to the channel through Eco Direct.
In the last financial year, PCL Direct sold over 100,000 toners and 60,000 drums with a failure rate below 1%. We also offer a 12-month warranty for the channel through our online warranty portal which the dealers have access to through a log-in system.
Steve Pearce: Firstly, offering our carbon neutral offering on every device in our range, from the home user right through to our flagship production print inkjet devices. Interestingly this green approach has been embraced by some and ignored by others. Those who have embraced our greener stance have experienced great success as meeting customer demands is now key to acquiring and retaining customers.
We have also actively worked with partners to take them on their own green journey, teaming up with Carbon Neutral Britain to audit their current carbon burden and give reduction strategies. We now have in the UK partners selling our energy-efficient carbon neutral devices supplied by our carbon neutral operation to their end- users by their carbon neutral operation. So, 2023 really did see a quantum shift forward for us as we want to work with our partners to help them along and advise them. Your green marathon will no doubt be tough, but it is always easier with a running partner.
Ben Mills: At Konica Minolta it is important we share our ambitious sustainability targets with our partners, which is why we made a public commitment to net-zero in Scope 1, 2 and 3 by 2050, and to also manufacture our products from more than 90% circulated resources by 2050. We are also transparent in accompanying every Konica Minolta product with a detailed environmental datasheet and Eco Leaf environmental label.
It is a philosophy shared by our partners, such as Agilico, with whom we have collaborated to create the National Refurbishment Centre in Leicester, which is breathing new life into ex-showroom and low utilisation machines.
We are also providing our partners with tools that help their customers gain insight into how their devices are being utilised and where improvements can be made to minimise material wastage, reduce energy consumption and lower costs. And, when consumables are discarded Konica Minolta will collect and recycle them as part of our World on Loan program.
Richard Wells: Quite simply, Epson is offering smaller, more energy- efficient solutions, descriptive features of our latest WorkForce Enterprise AM-C series. This aligns with Epson’s manufacturing philosophy of Sho Sho Sei, which translates from Japanese as ‘compact, efficient, and precise’, which is increasingly prominent within Epson’s technology portfolios.
Smaller size isn’t just a key factor in reducing emissions, but also complements the new balanced deployment of printing as organisations seek to optimise print size and functionality in their continually developing hybrid workspaces.
Stuart Miller: Being sustainable is now an expectation and a key driver of customer behaviour and loyalty. It is therefore important for channel partners to be able to advise their customers on the more sustainable printing options available to them when choosing the right product or service to meet their needs. As a responsible manufacturer, we at Canon collaborate closely with our partners to provide them with cutting-edge technology and offer top-quality in-house services to strengthen their sustainability proposition. With our partners at the heart of our business, our goal is to ensure they are always prepared to meet their customers’ requirements.
Will Armington: By partnering with Xerox, partners offering our devices, supplies, and programs have immediate access to the benefits included in those offerings, such as Ecolabels, circular economy benefits, and Xerox sustainability support. Xerox provides information and training sessions to its channel partners to inform them about the sustainability benefits of products, offerings, and corporate sustainability information.
Andrew Ellis: Through our Eco Direct range, we’re encouraging the dealer channel to work towards their own sustainability goals by promoting a range of machines that are a happy medium between a brand new model and a second-hand machine.
They look brand new, all the parts have been cleaned, batch tested and quality controlled, yet they have been completely upcycled. What’s more they’re cost-effective and still have a long life ahead of them. The toners used in the range are fully certified by ETIRA and, between us and the dealers we are all contributing to the circular economy.
