The benefits of thermal rewritable technology can be seen in working for traditional conservation situations – the idea of saving trees, reducing CO2 gas emission and cutting down waste material and reducing the print material cost over time. They can also be found on more application specific situations such as a data security conscious world – since the print media is reused, there is no need for the internal information leaking out and documentation shredding is not required.Advantages of thermal rewritable printing over conventional printing can be fully exploited in a closed system environment like commercial or industrial applications where the rewritable media can be recovered at the end of processes. Physical distribution within manufacturing cycle such as parts supply of assembly plant, for example, will be an ideal situation to take advantage of this technology in order to increase productivity and efficiency.Highly publicized and successful application is an adaptation of rewritable technology in “just-in-time” kanban system. In order to meet the demand of better erasing device, the new erase head which is one of the key components for the technology was developed. The HDA-2310 has erase width of 210 mm which will accommodate the kanban card size and erase speed of 100 mm/sec which is on par with the high speed thermal printhead used for rewritable application.
Hideo Taniguchi, Jiro Oi, "New erase head for kanban card size thermal rewritable media" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP24), 2008, pp 833 - 835, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2008.24.1.art00094_2