Epson’s EC-01 inkjet printer is the flagship product in their new Environmental Vision 2050 initiative: it’s shipped in an unpainted recycled cardboard box, the manual is printed on recycled paper, and the included driver CD is stored within an envelope made of recycled paper. But what really sets this printer apart is that you don’t replace the ink: when the cartridge runs out, you replace the whole printer.
The gentleman I spoke to at Epson’s IFA booth explained “When you purchase a Coca-Cola, it’s not the bottle that you want, it’s the Coca-Cola! Similarly, when you buy a printer, it’s not the printer that you want but the pages that printer can produce.” So just like you can return a Coca-Cola bottle to reclaim the depost included in the price, so too will you be able to return the EC-01 to Epson to get back 50 euros. The EC-01 ships with an ink tank that is estimated to yield 8,000 sheets.
“….you replace the whole printer.”
Great–brought to you by the same guys who want to you recycle your car when you run out of gas.
Did they include the carbon cost of shipping an entire printer back to epson?
Morans. (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=moran)
The environmental cost of shipping the unit back to Epson is negligible compared to the cost of producing and shipping (from manufacturer, to merchant, to consumer) the number of cartridges it takes to create 8000 printed pages. Let alone the environmental impact of disposing of these barely bio-degradable cartridge casings in landfill.
Using your car analogy, it’s like getting your petrol in a plastic case everytime you need to fill up, and then throwing the plastic casing away every single time. Instead (to further continue the analogy) it’s like buying a car that has enough petrol in it to last 40,000 miles. It’s the miles you pay for, not the car.
I work in education – where ecological concerns are high on the agenda – and the EC01 may not be the answer to everybody’s needs, but it is something new, innovative and the eco arguments do stand up. The cost of 8000 pages also stands up to closer scrutiny – if you pay for a 50 euro printer upfront, it seems a bargain – but expect to pay several hundred euros to reach that 8000 mark, significantly higher (almost double in some cases) than the one off payment for the EC01. It’s just getting over that initial cost and thinking more of the total cost of ownership which is the hard bit.
So cost-wise and eco-wise it’s not that bad an option……
The printer get refilled or recycled?
Or wasted?
the whole point of this printer is that EPSON makes most of its profits on the ink cartridges (margins are 1.5x that of printers). Since people in developing countries use cheaper third party ink cartridges, EPSON came up with this design to prevent that.