Handwritten labels on garden plants are usually unreadable after a few weeks outside. Rain dissolves cardboard and washes ink off plastic, and sunlight fades what’s left. The answer, according to Danish company Brandsoft, is to laser-print the label on a special plastic sheet, and take advantage of the high temperatures normally used to fuse the toner to make the message indelible (WO 03/012764).
Brandsoft’s polyolefin plastic sheet is designed to be fed into a printer instead of paper. The surface of the sheet is peppered with sub-micrometre pores, and the 250 °C temperatures used in the fuser unit help the toner penetrate the pores, where…
