Frac.ws

To many people printers and ink are a dull topic that only matters when the copier runs out of toner. To combat the apathy and antipathy towards printing supplies this edition of the toner blog will be spent discussing interesting Samsung toner cartridge info and trivia bits to occupy your time while you should be ordering another cartridge. So, with that in mind, did you know that…

The average Samsung toner cartridge takes between 400 and 1,000 years to break down and decompose, meaning that the cartridge you threw out the other week may quite possibly outlive our entire civilization. Add to that the knowledge that the U.S. alone throws away hundreds of millions of pounds of cartridges every year, filling landfills across the continent and creating enough garbage to wrap around the globe several times.

Samsung cartridges are built well, and despite what the company would lead you to think they can, in fact, survive multiple refills before needing to be retired to the recycling plant (or garbage bin). In fact, pretty much every cartridge you will see in your lifetime can either be refilled for immediate use, or sent into a recycling service to clean and refurbish the toner cartridge. Info on this process is around on the internet.

Printing and ink companies have felt so threatened by this recycling movement that they have threatened to void the warranty of any printer that has ever used a generic or refilled toner cartridge. This practice became prohibited by law in the U.S., so instead little computer chips were installed on each cartridge to prevent the printer from using it after it has been refilled. You need to either reset or replace the original chip to bypass this issue. And for the last bit of toner cartridge info: printing toner is not actually ink, but rather a combination of little plastic bits and coloring agents that bond together under heat to become the finished product we perceive as ink.