[sllug-members]: Laser printer toner particles and air quality

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

A BBC report earlier this week

        Office printers 'are health risk'
        http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6923915.stm

summarized results of research at the University of Queensland on how
laser printers can release small toner particles that can seriously
compromise air quality, and pose respiratory and other problems for
some people.

The formal research paper

        Particle Emission Characteristics of Office Printers
        Congrong He, Lidia Morawska, and Len Taplin

was published yesterday in the American Chemical Society journal
Environmental Science and Technology, and MAY be retrievable at this
location, if your institution or company has the needed access;
otherwise, you may need to pay a fee to download the article.

        http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/asap.cgi/esthag/asap/pdf/es063049z.pdf

Three things are evident from the article:

    * there is no single manufacturer to blame, since the emissions
      vary greatly across a single vendor's product line;

    * the large variations in the measurements show that a lot more
      work needs to be done to evaluate many different printer models
      in varying environments;

    * some laser printers pollute worse than copiers.

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