01.jpg (92.47 KB. 468x377 - viewed 2 times.)Printer cartridges are expensive and made of environmentally-unfriendly plastic. So far, the best alternative has been to refill empty cartridges or buy recycled ones, but designer Hoyoung Lee came up with a radically different idea: use pencil stubs as “ink” for a printer that also uses old erasers to get rid of mistakes. It’s called the Pencil Printer, and it’s an impractical – if very attractive-looking – design.
02.jpg (179.4 KB. 468x619 - viewed 2 times.)The designer proposes feeding small pencil stubs (sans metal bits or erasers) into a small hole in the printer. The printer then grinds and burns the pencil bits, making them into ink. We can’t quite figure out why a printer would need an eraser – unless you would feed already-printed papers back into the printer after discovering mistakes.
0.jpg (151.23 KB. 468x594 - viewed 2 times.)According to the designer, this revolutionary printer would save trees. For people who use pencils often enough to have stubs lying all over (artists, for example), this may even be a perfect solution for clearing up the clutter around the home or office. Of course, you probably couldn’t count on those graphite-printed papers to be legible forever, but you’d be recycling them as soon as you’re done anyway, right?
