Dry Fiber Technology, a proprietary set of technologies developed by Epson, transforms fibrous materials into tangible value without using water.¹ It produces highly functional materials by defibrating, binding, and forming fibrous materials as needed depending on the application. Dry Fiber Technology allows you to handle and process materials in ways you couldn't before, which not only reduces wastes but also produces new material characteristics.
Dry Fiber Technology adds value to what was once treated as waste and reduces the impact on the environment. We have named this type of manufacturing SmartCycle.

One of the products that uses Dry Fiber Technology is the PaperLab, the world's first office papermaking system², a machine that produces new paper from used paper without using water for defibration.Offices often hire a recycling service provider to collect and recycle their used paper. At paper recycling plants, used paper is broken down and separated into fibers in a mixture of water and chemicals. The fibers are then usually bleached before again being processed into paper. Recycling paper waste to reduce environmental impacts is problematic because the process consumes tremendous water resources.If paper can be made without using water, the paper recycling cycle will change dramatically. Epson's Dry Fiber Technology has made this papermaking dream possible.

We first sought to recycle paper that comes out of offices. Government offices and many businesses ordinarily use a paper recycling company to collect and recycle sensitive documents. However, for security reasons, they need to have an employee accompany the boxes of documents from pickup to pulping. Document disposal is burdensome as a result. Dry Fiber Technology development therefore began with a search for ways to completely dispose of used paper on-site, in the office.
Paper recycling plants use huge amounts of water to turn paper waste into pulp, but offices usually do not have the necessary plumbing facilities to supply and drain large amounts of water. Therefore, we needed to develop a way to recycle paper without using water. We tried thousands of different dry methods before coming up with a method of defibrate paper mechanically by subjecting it to impacts.
Next, we needed to find a way to remove the inked parts of printed paper without washing it. A member of the development team who used to work with laser printers used laser technology to sort colored fibers from non-colored fibers. A binding material called PaperPlus that Epson developed is added to the non-inked fibers. These fibers are then formed into sheets of new paper.
Since Dry Fiber Technology reduces paper to fibers, sensitive documents can be securely destroyed on site.

See here for information about how PaperLab contributes to the environment.

Epson's Dry Fiber Technology enables a SmartCycle by creating value from things that were once disposed of as waste and reducing the impact of manufacturing operations.Recently, for example, Epson collects used paper internally and uses the fibers from it to produce absorbent ink pads for Epson printers. Epson has also used Dry Fiber Technology to form the filtration layer situated between a mask's inner and outer layers from functional fibers, thus enabling the company to rapidly launch mask production.

Dry Fiber Technology can, in principle, extract fibers not only from paper but also from anything made of fibers, such as lumber and bamboo. Rather than recycling waste to use again in its original form, Dry Fiber Technology takes waste and creates new materials. Epson will continue to research ways in which the fibers that are produced can be used as resources.

• ¹ A small amount of water is used to maintain a humidity inside the system.
• ² Per Epson research conducted in November 2016

See the link below for more details about SmartCycle.