InkCycle founder and President Rick Krska hopes to create some serious green with the company’s latest product.

The product, called “grenk” (pronounced like a mashing together of green and ink), is a line of remanufactured printer toner and ink cartridges designed to be 100 percent environmentally friendly, including the packaging. The product even includes regular reports that tell customers exactly how much material their purchases have removed from the waste stream.

“The good news for us has always been that we’ve kept ink cartridges from going into the landfill after one use, so there has always been a 50 percent savings,” Krska said. “Now, we’re saying we want to clean up the rest of that waste stream so there is very little coming out the back end. We’re finding there are many companies out there that care about this.”

Krska said he was sitting in a café in California when the idea hit him that he could make a difference with a truly “green” product.

Toner cartridges are mainly plastic, he said, but also contain aluminum and steel parts. Recyclers exist for each part but not for the cartridge as a whole. So his idea was for InkCycle to separate the cartridge components.

“We put these together, so we can take them apart faster than anyone,” Krska said.

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