You can get thermal printers which can use either a thermal paper or a plain paper label with a wax ribbon. The ribbons will be sunlight survivable for decades, as it is a wax applied to the paper. Others use a dye sublimation technique to apply the dark mark to the paper, and are just as durable.
The Zebra printers are cheap, and pretty rugged, only had one power supply fail on them so far, and just replaced it with a generic laptop power brick ( set to 16V) and away it went again. The included software is capable enough to print most labels, and even can be integrated into some software to do numbered labels and other info direct from the database, though I do not use this, just have lots of templates for them. The thermal labels for the cheap ones are very cheap as well, you can get a large roll and feed it through from the rear, or just put the roll of 1000 inside the printer itself.