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Inkjet Cartridges: Recycling
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Inkjet cartridges keep office spaces supplied with their essential lifeblood – printer ink. Yet their common use throughout the world is so extensive that they are proving costly in more ways than one. Waste from inkjet cartridges takes a high toll on both the environment and expense budgets of many corporations and small businesses. Recycling inkjet cartridges, therefore, is not only a fundamental step to protecting the earth’s natural environment, but it is a source of significant monetary savings. Fortunately, Hewlett Packard has made it easy to recycle HP inkjet cartridges, helping simultaneously to save the earth, and the pocketbook.
Every year, the United States is responsible for consuming more than 500 million inkjet cartridges, with approximately 80% of those being discarded and sent directly to the landfills. While the vast majority of this excessive waste will sit in landfills indefinitely – it takes over 1,000 years for inkjet cartridges to biodegrade – a significant portion of the trash is incinerated, sending toxic fumes and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and further contributing to global warming.
The HP Planet Partners™ programme boasts having recycled more than 90 million kilograms of cartridges – most of them inkjet cartridges, although a percentage of that total are Laserjet cartridges as well. The success of HP’s environmentally friendly program is based largely on their ability to make recycling easy for their customers. Low volume users are provided with pre-paid mailing materials. Offices that use a larger volume of the inkjet cartridges are provided with heftier materials for sending it all back to HP recycling centers, for free.
But why does Hewlett Packard go to such an effort to have customers return their used HP inkjet cartridges to them? Apart from simply benefiting the earth and improving their public relations image, those cartridges are valuable to HP. Various independent companies will actually pay companies for their used inkjet cartridges. There is money in recycling. Cutting costs by using HP’s free recycling program can make sense, but it is also important to know the financial potential of recycling inkjet cartridges by selling them.
Lexmark also recognizes the economic benefits of recycling inkjet cartridges, but they do the opposite of HP, by actively discouraging you from recyling Lexmark inkjet cartridges. Lexmark gives consumers a discount for buying their cartridges, but make customers promise only to throw away or return their used cartridges to Lexmark. With what appears to be a calculated campaign of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), Lexmark promises to pursue legal action against customers caught selling their cartridges to recyclers, after agreeing not to.
Inkjet cartridge companies such as Lexmark and HP recognize the monetary value in recycling inkjet cartridges. By drawing Lexmark’s policy to its logical conclusion, it can be argued that they promote waste. HP has an approach that makes it much more likely for recycling to actually take place. In addition to sending your HP inkjet cartridges back to the company, inkjet cartridge users should also consider cutting overall costs by recycling your inkjet cartridges for a refund, by selling used cartridges to a qualified recycling company. Apart from the monetary value, recycling inkjet cartridges reduces waste and harmful emissions. So save the earth, and save money, by starting a inkjet cartridge recycling program today.