Stop the Presses

An article in the San Jose Mercury News tells us that it takes a gallon of oil just to make a toner cartridge.

That wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t discard 8 empty cartridges a second in the U.S. And if it didn’t take 450 years for one to decompose.

What are people doing about it? Some choose to mail it into the manufacturer. Others, like a company in California, are trying to make partnerships to pick up cartridges and recycle them.

Schools have used it as a fundraising mechanism, because Cartridge World will pay them $.25 per used cartridge.

Staples will also take back used printer cartridges in store.

To find a ink cartridge drop off in your area, use Earth 911’s recycling locator.

As of June 17th 2011 we have upgraded our comment system to use Facebook comments. The below comments are closed and are listed for historical purposes.

3 Archived Comments

  1. ecyclegroup

    posted on May 13th, 2008 at 9:02 am

    Free shipping. Responsible downstream management.
    eCycle Group is the trusted industry leader for printer cartridge and cell phone recycling.
    http://www.ecyclegroup.com

    Visit our blog to read about partner projects like Bloom High School’s biodiesel school bus!
    http://www.ecyclegroup.com/blog

  2. Save the Cartidges | Villages of Bogey Hills-St.Charles

    posted on March 8th, 2010 at 6:09 am

    [...] find your local ink cartridge drop off use earth911.com to find the nearest place to you! var addthis_pub = 'ncicsherpa'; var addthis_language = 'en';var [...]

  3. Martin

    posted on January 25th, 2011 at 12:14 pm

    Another way of putting it into perspective is that over 300 million cartridges end up in landfills across the US each year. That is equal to about 65,000 SUV’s and as Francine wrote it takes the average toner cartridge 450 years to decompose so those SUV’s keeps piling up. We all need to do better and start to recycle all our ink cartridges and laser toners. You can check out Inkpal.com and go to their Go Green section to read more.

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