REVOLUTIONISING THE PRINTED WORLD

Steve Weedon, Chief Executive at Pelikan Hardcopy PRP Solutions GmbH, speaks to Sustainable Business Magazine about how his company has developed the first environmentally friendly product in a traditionally environmentally un-friendly sector.

Pelikan Hardcopy PRP Solutions GmbH is a printer cartridge company steeped in history and innovation. With offices in Germany and the UK, its products are available worldwide and offer unrivalled advantages, particularly through its market-leading bio-based cartridges. These are 75% more effective than OEM items and come with unique sustainable credentials.

Steve Weedon, Chief Executive of PRPS, elaborates on the company’s history and why its legacy matters today:

“Pelikan as a brand is 185 years old. It was registered on April 28th 1838, so it’s a well-known brand that has built its reputation over 185 years. In fact, today it’s one of the world’s oldest brands. Everyone’s heard of Coca Cola, and that was registered in 1886, so that gives some perspective on how long Pelikan has been around. It started out as a pen ink company and has stayed in the ink manufacturing business ever since.

“That 185-year history is important because it has earned peoples’ trust. Today, in the aftermarket, there’s no such thing as trust. Buyers look solely at price. However, Pelikan is different. Those people that continue to buy the OEM product – which is about 80% of all end users – also buy from Pelikan because they see it as a brand they’ve known forever. It gives them imme- diate trust knowing that it’s not going to go away any time soon.

“We don’t try to compete with white box prices. The Pelikan brand is an alternative to the OEM – and at a price about 30% cheaper.”

Back To Basics

At the core of the Pelikan branded range are the Eco-Friendly cartridges which includes the first bio-based cartridge. This is the result of many years of research and development into an environmentally friendly alternative to the traditional printer cartridge.

“Let me explain why this even an issue in the first place,” Weedon says. “The OEM printer cartridge is not very eco-friendly. It’s made of high impact polystrene (HIPS), an oil-based product that doesn’t biodegrade. HIPS provides the cartridge a rigid and inflexible body, which is essential for printer cartridges to avoid smudges and other errors, but it is single-use. OEMs have started making some headway on research into sustainable alternatives, but that is only because we in the aftermarket have forced them to do so through our own portfolios. Otherwise, they would continue manufac- turing single-use cartridges because that’s the cheapest, easiest and most profitable way to run their razorblade-thin margins business model.

“What we’ve done is gone back to basics and looked at the cartridge design. We want to reduce the carbon footprint of each cartridge as much as we can. Back in 2005, there was a move within the aftermarket to try and develop toner powder from organic materials rather than carbon. A lot of toner manufacturers got together to figure out how to do that. Almost immediately we got toner powder up to to 10% organic content by using ingredients such as coffee grounds rather than carbon. However, there was a problem. Going beyond 10% meant we started losing the properties of the toner. The print quality was poor and defects were cropping up due to the lack of carbon.

“At this point, other toner manufacturers abandoned their research into an eco-friendly alternative. PRPS and Print-Rite didn’t, however. Our research and development continued for another 10 years until, in 2015, Print-Rite’s chief scientist approached me and said his team had managed to make a high quality toner with 47% organic materials. That immediately reduces the carbon footprint of our cartridges, of course, so we were really interested.”

That, however, was just the beginning advances into a sustainable printer cartridge in the Pelikan branded range.

“We also wanted to investigate the possibility of an alternative to the HIPS-based plastic that all other cartridges used. We did a lot of work on that and ended up using ABA and PLA plastics. Those are reusable forms of plastic, meaning we could reclaim the cartridges and use them again once the product’s lifecycle had finished. Moreover, those plastics contain around 57% micro-organisms. That means if the product ends up in landfill, with the 60 degrees Fahrenheit and 90% humidity usually found in most landfill sites, the Micro-organisms will begin to eat away at the biodegradable plastics, and will start to decompose at 90-180 days. That’s obviously much better than HIPS-based OEM and other aftermarket cartridges, which could remain for thousands of years.”

These two characteristics of the Pelikan branded bio-based cartridges were revolutionary. The company applied for TUV plastics certification, something which requires proof of at least a 20% carbon footprint reduction. PRPS easily passed this and became the first cartridge company to hold TUV certification. It launched its first bio-based range in 2020.

Expansion Pack

That wasn’t the only area PRPS knew it could improve upon, though. Apart from challenging the eco-credentials of OEM manufacturers, it also wanted to show that it was possible to innovate against other aftermarket competitors too.

Weedon explains how PRPS expanded the capacity of its cartridges in a unique way:

“We didn’t want to compete on price, mass production, and cutting corners on product lifecycle. Those approaches only result in less environmentally-friendly outcomes. What we wanted to do was give our cartridges the type of expanded capacity that other companies offer, but in a sustainable way.

“Other remanufacturers will take existing cartridges and over-fill them with toner so that they can say it gives three or four times the yield of the OEM product. That way they can also claim they’re reducing the carbon footprint by creating a product that prints more pages. The trouble with that approach is that, depending on what you’re printing, it can generate a lot more waste toner by spilling into the waste hopper. Nobody knows where the cartridges are going to be used, so they can’t predict how much waste toner a specific application will generate. The spillage also creates problems in the printer itself, and having to pay £250 for a repair isn’t financially sound.

“What PRPS have is done is develop our our technology to solve this problem. It’s not even the OEM technology any more, it’s ours. When you get HIPS-based plastic OEM product that offers 1500 pages as a yield, for example, there is approximately 15% carbon toner left in the cartridge at the time that the printer is asking you to replace it. The reason it’s left in the cartridge is because it’s not transferred onto the page. It’s gone into a waste toner hopper. You can’t reuse it. And that 15% is obviously a carbon issue in itself.

“What we’ve done is develop a range of products where we ensure that 100% of the toner within the cartridge ends up on your page. None of it ends up in the waste toner hopper. We then realised that by solving the waste toner problem, we also solved the ‘jumbo cartridge’ problem of spillage. Instead of overfilling a standard cartridge and having the waste toner spill out in the machine, because our product doesn’t produce any waste there’s no risk of tone spilling out into the machine.

“By redesigning the cartridge, we were able to take an OEM’s 1500 page product and turn it into a cartridge that can print 9000 pages. Moreover, it used less plastic because we didn’t need the waste toner bin. That means, on this issue, our cartridge reduces the carbon footprint compared to an OEM product by 75%. It also reduces the CO2 created by transportation of the cartridges by six to seven times. As a result, the end user gets a far lower cost per page than with either the OEM or other aftermarket solutions.

“These are the sorts of things that we are doing under the Pelikan brand to create unique products that are more environmentally beneficial than other available alternatives.”

Gap In The Market

PRPS isn’t just a reseller or remanufacturer. It researches and develops its own technology, marking it out not only from other aftermarket competitors but also from the OEM. Weedon makes it clear that Pelikan’s branded cartridge strength is in its originality:

“We don’t infringe on OEM patents because we don’t need to. We recognise their technology, we understand them, and we work around them by creating our own patented technologies.”

To date, The Print-Rite Group, which we are part of, has more than 3200 of its own patents. Much of this is in solutions that facilitate the company’s ecologically sustainable products, meaning it is a clear market leader in this area.

“Almost every company has some sort of policy over environmental sustainability today,” Weedon says. “I would suggest that companies do it as a matter of rote. The statement is typically worded by one of the internal lawyers, and even their employees don’t know it or understand it, and it doesn’t mean very much on a day to day basis. They give it lip service. What we’ve done at here is practice the message for more than 40 years. We’re committed to innovation through technology and research and development.”

“We can see a gap in the market where OEMs could go a lot further on their consumables to make them more environmentally friendly. So we’ve done that, and we’ve done it cheaper than the original. For the customer that’s a double whammy: they get a lower priced product, and they get a product that’s more environmentally friendly. Many companies now are committed to reducing their CO2 footprint in an environmentally-friendly manner; sustainability managers are almost everywhere now. We see our products as a way to help our clients and end users achieve their own sustainability.

“We’re not going to change the world with bio-based cartridges. We can’t save the planet on our own. However, these are little things that everyone needs to do to do their bit, and we’re here to help out.” c

For more information about the Pelikan branded Eco-Friendly range and how they can help you reduce your carbon footprint or to find your local stockist of the range contact Steve Weedon at info@prp-eu.com.