|
DECOPYCAT
How can you take care of confidential information and save paper at the same time? Sushil Bhatia’s neat invention, the
Decopier, which erases documents, leaving blanks sheets ready for re-use, is just what the doc ordered for World Inc
By Rakesh K. Simha
|
 |
Corporate America swears by this Indian-born inventor. The US Navy and Air Force love him. And the CIA and the FBI wouldn’t catch a moment’s sleep if they didn’t have one of his machines. Meet Sushil Bhatia, the Framingham (Massachusetts)-based inventor of the Decopier, one of the neatest inventions ever to tumble out of America’s gizmo factory. Here’s how it works. You take a printout of a classified file and circulate it in a board meeting. After the meeting is over, you have two options: one, lock it away and hope nobody steals it; or two, use the shredder and hope some determined weirdo doesn’t put it back again. Well, now you have a third option: you feed the prints into a Decopier and in the time that it takes you to say cappuccino, the machine erases the sheets, leaving crispy, white paper that are ready for re-use, and reuse, and resue, all of 11 times. Cool? To be sure, those in the business of espionage and in the paper shredder business do not agree — they would love to shred Bhatia to bits.
“We call it a Decopier because it uses a similar process to the photocopier, but has the opposite function,” says Bhatia. “With a copier you take blank paper, run it through the machine and an image is transferred to the paper. The Decopier works the opposite way. You take a printed page, put in our machine, and in seconds, you have clean, perfectly usable paper.”
Discover magazine gave an environmental award—which was also won by another US-based Indian Subhendu Guha (see Pravasi Bharat)—to Bhatia, president of Imagex Technologies in 1998. Here’s what they wrote: The difficulty with copiers and laser printers, he found, is that the toner is embedded deeply in the paper because of the heat and pressure used in the process. Newsprint ink, by contrast, lies mostly on the surface, which is why it rubs off on your hands but makes newspapers easier to recycle. So Bhatia and a team of researchers found a chemical that sunders the bond between the toner and the paper.
Bhatia has figured out how to decopy paper from 15 different copiers in addition to overhead slides. He envisions his Decopier being put to work mainly in large companies. By decopying and reusing white paper instead of throwing it away, a big office could in theory cut paper costs by 70 per cent. Plus, the toner that is washed away in the process could be used in road construction.
Bhatia believes that a paperless office is a myth. “People rush to print the messages and information because they somehow feel more secure holding a printed piece of paper”, he continues. “An increase in photocopiers, laser printers and fax machines also increases the use of paper. I was looking at the growth of the personal computer in people’s lives and that got me thinking about just how much paper people use these days. “The idea of a paperless office is never going to happen.”
|
