HP's Steven Goddard talks about their initiative in the Deinking Alliance

Part of our continuing Going Green coverage, Steven Goddard, Environmental Leadership Program Manager for HP shares how HP is leading the charge for green deinking initiatives.

So hello. I’m Stephen Goddard. I’m the environmental Leadership Program manager of the HP Graphics Solutions Business and I’m here to talk about the deinking of digital prints. It’s been a hot topic over the last year or two; it’s certainly possible to deink paper printed on analog technology and also presses etc. And so that the paper can be recycled back into other paper products and paper on which you can print once again. And there had been concerns about whether you can actually do that with digital prints. And thinking both of our inkjet and electro photographic prints.

And there’s a lot of research that’s taking place right at the moment on the electro photographic side of our business thinking about our HP electro ink, which is used in our HP Indigo Digital Presses. We’ve been working with the University of Western Michigan and with the New Page Corporation to do trials of denkability; we did that at the Deinking Lab at Western Michigan University. So those trials were successful and so we have a very good basis to go forward and actually move to larger scale trials in the future and with both just electro ink prints and also mixing it with offset printers as well.

On the inkjet side of the business, also very, very encouraging results. A lot of work going on at our labs, both within Hewlett Packard and also collaborating with some of our competitors through the Digital Print Deinking Alliance. We’ve teamed up there with Océ and Kodak and Ricco Infoprint to actually jointly to find and fund digital print deinking research. I’m also working with a number of major paper companies on trials including UPM Storenzo and again, what we have so far is some very encouraging results. Of course, not uniformly good at this stage, but enough to make us believe that as we work with our partners in thinking about and how we could continue to design not only the inks, but also deinking processes and also papers that we can… as the volume of inkjet prints grows that we can ensure continued good deink ability of paper as we go forward.