Toner News Mobile › Forums › Latest Industry News › XEROX BET's TONER FUTURE ON IT'S NEW EA-TONER TECHNOLOGY
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AnonymousInactivehttp://rocnow.com/article/business/2009910130310
XEROX BET’s IT’S TONER FUTURE ON IT’S NEW EA TONER TECHNOLOGY
Two
years after Xerox Corp. flipped the switch on the biggest investment in
its Webster campus in a generation, the company’s EA toner plant is
churning out product for office copiers and digital printing presses
worldwide.The printing and imaging company increasingly is offering
products that use the radically new line of emulsion aggregation
toner.“It’s a very important product for us in the future,” said Mary
Fromm, manager of worldwide toner manufacturing for Xerox.
“Conventional toner, we’ve pretty much matured (the technology) to
where improvements are incremental. EA, the horizons are wider.”Traditionally,
toner has been made by mixing various ingredients into pellets that
then are ground into a dust-like compound that gets melted onto sheets
of paper.Emulsion aggregation, or EA, toner uses chemical processes to
“grow” toner from its ingredients into tiny individual toner particles.
It takes 50 of them to form a period at the end of a sentence.Several
Xerox competitors, including Canon Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., have
their own chemical toner products.The Webster toner plant, which
employs about 50, produces two-thirds of the company’s global output of
EA toner, the rest coming from a plant in Canada.Fuji Xerox Co., which
is a joint venture with FujiFilm Holdings Corp., also produces EA toner
in Japan for the Pacific Rim market.Since the
110,000-square-foot, $60 million Webster plant began operating in
September 2007, Xerox has made sizable changes. In the past nine
months, the plant increased its production capacity 30 percent through
efficiencies such as getting more material into production tanks, which
allows more toner to be produced in the same amount of time, said plant
manager Michael Duggan.The plant also has cut down on set-up
time needed when switching from production of one color toner to
another, he said.The company late last year installed six 25,000-gallon
tanks for product of Ultra Low-Melt EA toner, which melts and fuses
onto paper at lower temperatures than Xerox’s standard EA toner,
resulting in devices using as much as 30 percent less power.Xerox
declined to say what the plant’s output is. But it has released a
number of products that use EA toner, including WorkCentre office color
multifunction machines and black-and-white production presses.Chief
Executive Ursula Burns said earlier this year that when Xerox does
reach a point when it needs an additional EA plant, it likely wouldn’t
be in the Rochester area.Instead, the company would probably locate the
plant on another continent, closer to other markets.Xerox has
traditional toner plants scattered across the globe from Webster to
Brazil, India and the Netherlands.The company currently isn’t planning
to phase out its production of conventional toner, Fromm said.While
making EA toner uses less electricity than the manufacture of
traditional toner, it is a heavy consumer of water. Xerox currently is
trying out a modification of its EA toner manufacturing process that
could cut water use by 10 percent, Duggan said. -
AuthorOctober 20, 2009 at 10:46 AM
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