We appreciate much of this may be teaching granny to suck eggs, so if you’re looking for Safety Data Sheets on the precise make-up of Xerox toners for your HSE and accreditation reporting, head straight to the question at the bottom where we explain where to find them.
What is printer toner?
Toner is a powder mixture usually supplied in a sealed cartridge. Until relatively recently, it was likely to be provided in Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (known as CMYK). Colour printers use CMYK in various combinations and blends to create a vast array of colours.
It has become more common in recent years to find ‘new’ toner colours – white toner (for example in the Xerox C8000W and upwards) and other speciality colours including metallics and fluorescents. CMYW prints on dark paper and media instead of lighter shades (the ‘W’ for ‘White’ replaces the ‘K’ for ‘Black’).
How does toner ‘stick’ to a page?
Most toners use granulated plastics (polymers) which are either petroleum or plant-derived. When heated by the fuser, these plastic particles melt and ‘fuse’ onto the paper or other media.
The printer ‘knows’ where to put the toner particles by forming an electrostatic image on a turning drum. This electrical charge attracts the toner/developer mix from the cartridge onto the ‘right’ areas of the drum (see more on developer below). Through various further processes, the toner transfers onto the page.
Clusters of dots too small for the human eye create the vast array of colours we see. Under a magnifying glass, you see a dot from each of the CMYK toners contributing to each shade.
If the toner includes plastic, what is Xerox doing to lessen its environmental impact?
This is an excellent question and one of which we and our partners are mindful. Microplastics are, of course, the subject of increasing investigation. We also need to factor in that heating up particles in the toner consumes energy during the printing process, and that energy has an associated carbon footprint. There is also the critical question of what happens to print after it has been consumed and whether we can efficiently de-ink and recycle it.
Xerox employs innovators and expert scientists to explore all of these challenges. At its research centres, it has been making progress in many areas including:
identifying more sustainable sources of polymers for toners and inks
developing compounds with lower melt points
reducing the amount of packaging and waste
evolving toner into a mixture that can be removed from paper more easily (de-inking) for recycling (the Iridesse has received a score of 100/100 for deinkability, even on gold, silver, white and clear)
Finding the right sustainable solutions means taking the whole environmental lifecycle into account. For example, it is possible to derive polymers from ethanol (itself made from corn). Still, the vast amount of energy – and therefore, a large carbon footprint – required to do this currently makes it unviable.
Innovation needs to embrace a more circular economy but also offer a product at a price consumers can afford. As is observed around the globe and across industries, this is not always easy to achieve. We do believe, however, that things are improving: Xerox is continually moving forward. Learn more about Xerox’s quest for more sustainable toners and inks here.
What is Speciality Dry Ink for a printer?
Speciality Dry Inks are toners, but not as we once knew them. They include metallic (gold and silver), white, clear and fluorescent yellow, pink, magenta and cyan.
What are Xerox Emulsion Aggregation (EA) Toners?
EA toners are advanced toners with further reduced environmental impact. They are energy efficient in terms of their manufacturing as well as their use (reducing the energy cost per page). A gram of EA Toner can make more printed pages than the equivalent of conventional toner.
The toner may look similar to the human eye when compared with other formulations, but decades of research have made it flow better, fuse better, store better – and all that adds up to sharper and clearer prints. EA Toners use tiny sub-micron size particles brought together (the ‘aggregation’ part) to form the desired particle size and spherical shape. ‘Emulsion’ is the chemical process that forms the toner resin. Small particles = crisp images. It also means a less energy-intensive process, higher reliability and faster warm-up times.
This is different from the process of creating conventional toners. More traditional toners are made by mixing plastics with pigments and other ingredients into a block. This block is then smashed to pieces to make a fine powder which needs to be processed to remove the pieces too large and too small. The traditional process is limited by which ingredients can withstand the melt mixing, and therefore Xerox’s newer production presses are optimised for EA toner instead. In straightforward terms, EA toner builds up rather than being broken down.
You can read more about EA toners here.
Where does liquid printer ink come in?
While most Xerox presses use toner or dry ink, inkjet technology has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. The Xerox Baltoro HF Industrial Inkjet Press uses High Fusion liquid ink for the best ‘inkonomics’ yet.
Inkjet processes use liquid ink to squirt microscopic droplets of ink through thousands of tiny inkjet heads or nozzles and onto paper. It was once the case that this process resulted in production prints of lower quality to digital toner presses, but this is changing fast. An investment in a Baltoro is a large one. Still, the quality of print you can now get, and the speed at which you can turn around jobs – let alone the possibilities afforded by roll sheet and variable printing – is awe-inspiring.
What is the developer in a printer?
Each laser (toner) printer has a developer unit. Without it, no toner would get to a page. However, because toner needs replenishing regularly and developer doesn’t, it’s a lesser-known part of the printing process.
As with everything in this blog, we’ve tried to reduce quite complicated processes down to something much more straightforward to understand, so it’s important to say that different presses and manufacturers‘ products work in slightly different ways. Larger presses have a separate drum whereas smaller printers often have the developer combined into the toner cartridge unit. However, we think it’s fair to sum up where the developer comes in for Xerox digital presses in the following way…
In simple terms, the developer is mixed with the toner so that the toner can magnetically attract to the drum. Each toner has a separate drum. The toner comes off the drums onto a transfer belt and is subsequently deposited on the paper. Next, the paper is fed through a fuser where the toner is heated and therefore ‘fused’ onto the media. The developer is reclaimed and reused during the printing process: this is why it does not run out as fast as the toner.
Unlike toner changes, swapping the developer unit/drum is often an engineer job.
What is the difference between the printer toner and the printer developer?
The printer toner contains the colour and is the powder that sticks onto the paper. The developer has to be mixed with the toner to make it work but is reclaimed afterwards. When combined, the developer makes the toner magnetically attract to the drum, and this is part of the process by which the press turns a digital image into a printed one. They need each other to complete the printing process but perform different functions.
Does toner have an expiry date?
Yes. Usually, though, the expiration date is far enough off into the future that it is unlikely you will not use it before it goes ‘out of date’.
We do not advise using expired toner in your press for the same reasons that we do not recommend using non-approved media – it could reduce the quality of your output or cause issues inside your press.
Be careful to distinguish between a shipping date, manufacturing date and expiration date. If you are a customer with any questions about consumables, please contact our support team who will be happy to help.
What is in my Xerox toner? Where do I find Safety Data specification sheets for Xerox toners for my accreditation/risk assessments?
Increasingly we are being asked where to find information about toner compounds to comply with accreditations, compliance, industry standards, environmental assessments and risk controls.
At the time of writing, the site you need for Xerox toners and devices is: https://safetysheets.business.xerox.com./
There are hundreds of documents on the site, so we’ll only provide the example of Xerox Versant 280 toners to demonstrate the process. Navigating from the Safety Sheets link above, which takes you to a page entitled ‘Safety Documents and Compliance Information’, we recommend scrolling down the list to find your press under ‘Search by product’, first and foremost.
For this example, select ‘Versant’ and then ‘Versant 280’. This will narrow your data sheets down to relevant documentation. To find a specific toner document, you need to click in and out of each Safety Data Sheet until you find the correct one. Each item appears in the list as a reference number, not the product’s name, making the search function a little awkward for general use (search for ‘Versant Gold’, for example, and nothing will come up). In this case, when clicked and read, the documents in the Versant 280 section are as follows:
P-70004 is CMYK Toner (one link provided as an example)
P-70027 is silver
P-70028 is clear
P-70029 is gold
P-70030 is white…
The list continues with fluorescent toners. If you need more information, please contact us and we will do our best to help you, following up with our Xerox colleagues if necessary.
