Frac.ws

Businesses in America go through an astronomical number of toner cartridges for their printers every year, creating huge landfills of photocopier waste that take centuries to decompose. It is far past time for American companies to realize the insane amount of waste they are generating and work to increase toner cartridge recycling in their own offices. There are, of course, plenty of environmental reasons that illustrate the need for cartridge recycling. Each cartridge you throw away puts 2-3 pounds of plastic and metal pollutants into the earth and takes the better part of millennia to break down. Now consider that as a country we waste more than 300 million of these printer cartridges each year–that’s enough to line up end-to-end and build a bridge to the moon in under a decade.

Yet the advantages of toner cartridge recycling go far beyond just the environmental impact: the economic incentives are just as bountiful. Each toner cartridge thrown away contains about 97% reusable parts. Through a simple process of cleaning and replacing worn parts these cartridges can be refilled and resold at a fraction of the cost it takes to produce a new cartridge.

Toner cartridge recycling also has two long term economic benefits: conservation and stimulation. First, each time a 3 pound toner cartridge is recycled it conserves 5 to 9 pounds of virgin material that can be used for other products. Second, that recycling process necessitates businesses to re-manufacture the cartridges, and many recycling companies will pay consumers to turn in their cartridges. This creates local jobs in recycling those cartridges and selling them to the recycling plant.

There are no good reasons to throw away your toner cartridges when they are empty. It is simply cheaper and more environmentally friendly to either sell them to a recycling company, or to clean and refill them on your own. By taking that simple step you reduce prices, save money, create jobs during an economic recession, and help preserve the environment.