Posts Tagged ‘degradable products’
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
E-Waste fastest growing U.S. municipal waste; recycling increase required
The Electronics TakeBack Coalition reports that between 20 and 50 million metric tons of e-waste is thrown away each year worldwide. Americans contribute more than 3 million tons yearly. The coalition also points out that only 13 percent of discarded electronic devices are recycled in the United States. Here, earth911.com reports that e-waste is rapidly becoming more of a problem, increasing at a rate three times greater than other municipal waste.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Recycling Ink is Good for the Environment and Charity
Here is an article from FundraisingIP.com giving tips on how ink cartridge recycling fundraisers are popular with non-profit organizations because they are easy and keep millions of useful cartridges out of landfills. There are several things organizations can do to make an ink cartridge recycling program even more successful.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
What really happens to print cartridges…
In the next four years, more than 590 million print cartridges will be consumed in North America. Where will they end up?
Millions will be simply thrown away, where they’ll eventually be dumped in landfills around the country.
Because of their hard plastic and metal materials, discarded cartridges can take hundreds, even thousands of years to decompose, and their unused inks and toners can leach into the surrounding soil and contaminate ground water.
Millions more will be tossed-in good faith- into recycling bins but these are often shipped overseas to less responsible countries. Harmful human labor practices are used to siphon unused toner from the cartridges and waste products are often burned in open ditches. Add this human misery to the pollution and energy drain caused by shipping millions of cartridges overseas and, well, it’s not really a solution.
Even the millions that will be legitimately recycled into other things will impact the environment. Plastics are reprocessed into “regrind” and used in plastic injection to make things like park benches. That’s great, but think of the energy used and the pollutants expelled from those processes, which will be repeated over and over.
grenk takes a different path. We control where every piece of our product ends up, from every metal spring to every plastic housing. We reuse what we can for its original purpose, and then make sure the rest is recycled under our control; using fewer natural resources and creating fewer end-waste cycles.
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.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
The grenk Process: Let’s Start Fresh
Take a look at what makes the grenk process green:
Boxes are made from the highest available content of recycled material and are chain-of-custody certified.
No tape! A proprietary pad and re-usable clips eliminate the need for tape.
Storage bags are made from a new oxygen-degradable polyethylene film that begins degrading in months instead of hundreds of years like standard bags.
Storage clips are returned for reuse or recycling.
Air pillows not only protect our cartridges, they reduce the amount of plastic we use.
We test-print every cartridge before we ship it. Those test sheets are then shredded and reused to fill the storage bags.
All components that aren’t reusable are placed into a best-practices recycling stream. Nothing is thrown away.
Blades, gears and OPC Drums are reconditioned and reused whenever possible.
It’s one thing to recycle a print cartridge. InkCycle’s been doing that since 1992. But with grenk, we recycled the entire process, finding new ways to make our cartridges-and our entire business-more eco-friendly and sustainable.