While this is a big move from a major company, and sure to make headlines, a smaller company has come up with an even more interesting eco-friendly printer.
The Riti Coffee Printer amazingly uses your recycled coffee grounds to create printer ink. The printer works by replacing the ink cartridge by placing used grounds in an ink case. You manually move the ink case left and right to print text, which makes it totally energy independent as well.
While not practical for large scale printing projects, who wouldn't love getting a letter from a friend printed in this way? If you don't drink coffee, the printer also works with tea.
The Riti printer was one of the top 50 entries in this year's Greener Gadgets Competition.
An interesting point was made that today's refillable ink cartridges could probably be filled with coffee or tea, but how strong would it have to be? That's an interesting possibility that should probably be explored further. It brings back memories of days when students used cartridge pens, and refilled the plastic cartridges with food coloring to create a rainbow of written words.
From huge corporations to home workshop inventors, creative minds are coming up with more green, eco-friendly ways to print what our computers produce. This is just a start, and the future promises to show us more innovation and inspiration in taking computer printers to a green world.
