Ever thought about toner recycling? What happens to all those used cartridges your office uses? If your office is like most, when an empty ink or toner cartridge is pulled from your printer, it ends up in the trash without a second thought. Recently, however, it has become more commonplace for businesses to ride the green wave of environmental stewardship and take strides to reduce their ecological footprint. These efforts including the recycling of used print cartridges rather than disposing of them along with other waste.
Why recycle print cartridges?
In the simplest of terms, recycling your used ink cartridges is far better for the environment than sending them to landfills. Besides the obvious - minimizing landfill waste - recycling cartridges is a more eco-friendly option for a number of reasons including:
- saving energy used to produce new ones
- minimizing contributions to greenhouse gas emissions
- reducing the extraction of non-renewable resources
- decreasing your contributions to air and water pollution
- minimizing the amount of raw materials used to produce other products
Did you know that it will take approximately 450 years for one empty toner cartridge to decompose in a landfill? Other parts of the cartridge are made from industrial grade plastic, which takes upwards of 1,000 years to decompose. More than 375 million empty ink and toner cartridges are thrown in the trash each year without considering recycling. With numbers of this nature, it's critical that we begin to recycle.
How do we recycle used cartridges?
So now that you see the value in recycling ink cartridges, you're on board with recycling them. But how do you go about doing so? As a Fraser customer, we offer a free toner recycling program. Just contact our supplies department and request your pre-paid labels and boxes. Once they arrive, set up the open boxes and let staff know you will be recycling toner cartridges. When a cartridge is done, just place it in the box, and when the box is full, just tape it up and attach your pre-paid shipping label. It's really that simple.