Yesterday was America Recycles Day. Recycling is tricky. Most of us want to recycle because we don’t want to throw trash in the landfills. But in order to be used, the recycled material has to be processed, and there has to be a business market willing to buy it. The truth is the things we recycle don’t always do the good we intend. In many cases, like city recycling programs, some of the recycled material has to be filtered out and ends up in the landfills anyway, and the final product can be too expensive and too low quality to be much use to businesses. Here at Print.Save.Repeat. we acknowledge that recycling is a tricky process that doesn’t completely live up to the ideal, but there is good news! Recycling can provide value and truly benefit the environment. One case where recycling works well is printer cartridges.
Each new cartridge is made with plastic and metal parts that last much longer than it takes to use up the toner inside. If a cartridge is only used once and sent to the landfill, much of the life expectancy of the core is wasted, so we reuse cartridge cores to manufacture new cartridges. However, this doesn’t work for every type of cartridge. We have experimented with many different cartridges and found the ones where the disassembly, cleaning, and toner refill can be done in a way that maintains print quality just as good as the original at a lower cost. This means businesses want to buy them. That’s when recycling cartridges is a win-win, and that’s what gets us excited. It drives the economy and benefits the environment! Of course, even our process results in some waste. We have to replace some parts of the cartridge which wear out too fast to maintain good print quality; we have to trash cores that have reached the end of their high-performance life expectancy; and because each cartridge has to be reassembled, we have to test every cartridge to ensure quality, which costs some paper (which we sell to paper recyclers!). But in the end, you (the buyer) receive a cartridge that will keep your business humming, while truly helping the environment.
And remember, you can do the environment even more good by printing only necessary things like labels and business critical documents. Happy printing!