Brinda Dalal, an anthropologist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, has become a self-styled “garbologist” to assist chemists at the Xerox Research Center of Canada to develop an “erasable paper” system, reports the IHT/NYTimes.

The goal is to recycle paper documents produced by the company’s copiers as many times as possible.

… Dalal’s research is part of a three-year- old technology development effort to add a system to office copiers that produce “transient documents” that can be easily reused. The researchers now have a prototype that will produce documents on a specially coated paper with a light yellow tint.