Thursday, May 21, 2009
InkCycle was Green Before Green was Cool.
Reported by: Mark Clegg for NBC Action News
When it comes to living green, there’s a lot more to it than just recycling. A Metro company built their business on that 16 years ago, but they’re still looking for ways to improve the environment today.
InkCycle takes used toner and inkjet cartridges and rebuilds them.
“We take them and put them through a real extensive process,” explains InkCycle’s President and Chief Executive Servant Rick Krska. “We then clean them and refill them, repackage them, and deliver them back through resellers to customers.”
The company has come a long way since 1992 when Krska started with one clear mission — to keep electronic clutter out of our landfills.
“We were kind of green before green was cool,” Krska laughs.
The process starts by opening the cartridge. The foam insert is then removed and discarded. The cartridge is then flushed out with water removing the ink residue inside.
InkCycle added another green incentive to this process in recent years. They run that inky water through a water treatment facility, where an electro coagulation process cleans it of any impurities.
Senior Project Engineering Manager Rob Rayburn explains: “We basically take anything that’s in the water that’s bad; make it settle out like mud.”
Once the cartridges are cleaned and ready, they are sent to the production line for the next step.
“We reinstall the foam in the cartridge, that’s your method of retaining the ink,” Rayburn explains. “We put a new cap on the cartridge. That’s to seal the cartridge up. And start the functionality of venting, then the next thing we’ll do is fill the cartridge with ink.”
To insure their cartridges meet or exceed standards — each and every cartridge is tested before it is packaged. With 114 different cartridges — that means more than 5,000 test printers scattered around the production lines.
“We know people don’t buy printers to have them smudge, smear and sprinkle down the page,” Krska says. “So our orientation has always been to have them perform as close to the OEM, sometimes better.”
InkCycle added another green initiative recently called Grenk — a zero landfill program. Any toner cartridges that can’t be recycled are reused in the form of energy by a metro concrete producer.
Krska explains: “And what they do is, what we do together is grind up this… used to be a toner cartridge. And now its shredded plastic and it becomes fuel for this concrete plant to cook their concrete.”
With Grenk, InkCycle also issues the companies an environmental impact report, outlining just how much electronic waste they’ve kept out of the environment, and how much it’s saved the client.
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