HP's Eco-Friendly Innovation, The Corn Printer

HP's steps toward creating eco-friendly programs have been a success over the past years this includes their printers and printer cartridges recycling programs. But on 2011's Green Festival Event held in San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center, Hewlett Packard introduced another innovation to their eco-friendly program, the HP Corn Printer.Yes, it may sound unrealistic but this printer is real. It is made of bio-polymer, also called bio-resins, which are extracted from corn seeds or maize crop we typically eat as popcorn. The HP Corn Printer is a biodegradable printer which decompose on its own once you left it anywhere or on your backyard as what HP's spokesperson Lynelle Preston had said, "You can't throw it in your backyard. Given the right conditions, it would disappear."

Bruno Zago, Environmental Manager at HP UK and Ireland, on the other hand, described the HP Corn Printer as, “It is actually made out of corn starch. I’m not saying you can eat it, but it is a bit like a taco.”

"Corn requires fertilisers and they take a lot of energy to manufacture. It requires irrigation and that’s probably the biggest piece. So when you look at the environmental impact of growing corn to create a printer it’s quite huge,” he added.“Then you get into the social issues as well, where people say, ‘You’re starting to grow crops to make bio-fuels and bio-plastics, you’re starting to impact upon food.’ So there are a few issues there and currently we’ve not taken bio-plastics any further.”

Although Hewlett-Packard already manufactured 100 prototypes of the Corn Printer, Dean Miller confirmed that it will still take time for the major printer manufacturing company to develop these biodegradable printers into perfection.

“We continue to look at them and investigate them and we’re working with a number of bio-resin suppliers to tell them what our needs are so that they can move the material in directions that would be possible for us,” said Miller.

Sources: Absolute Gadget