Be a Part of the Solution
Many people have either dusted off their home printers, or purchased one to use for the growing trend to work from home. And unless you have a tech-savvy person in your household, you’ve probably mastered changing the printer ink or toner cartridge when the printer refused to print even one more page. Then what did you do with the old cartridge that you removed? Hopefully you didn’t throw it out!
According to Earth911, more than 500 million printer cartridges are sold each year in the United States, and more than half — 350 million of those — are sent to landfills. Toner cartridges are both recyclable and reusable, so more eco-friendly options for disposal exist. Maybe you knew you could recycle them, but didn’t know how or where.
Fortunately, there are several retail stores and manufacturers that are making it easy and free to recycle used ink cartridges! If you purchase your supplies online or locally at Staples, you can bring back the spent cartridges to your local store, or request a shipping label to recycle your cartridges online, and they’ll even give you $2 back in rewards! Office Depot and Office Max have a similar arrangement with an incentive for reward members.
If you use Canon brand ink or toner cartridges in your printer, you can either mail them back to the address on their webpage, or you can drop off your used cartridges at participating FedEx Print & Ship Centers. No cash incentive, but won’t you feel good knowing you’re not putting more plastic in our landfills?
If you’re back to work at your office location, there are easy ways to recycle the large toner cartridges that your copier uses for printing. Here is a handy link to a collection of companies to help you find the brand you need and learn how to recycle their products. Here’s a tip: when you or a technician install a new toner cartridge in your copier, save the box it came in to use when recycling your old cartridge.
You may think that an ink cartridge or toner cartridge is such a small thing, but HP states that more than 875 million original HP Ink and Toner Cartridges have been recycled by customers with HP Planet Partners!
YOU can be part of the solution!