This is because many of these high-tech gadgets and parts contain lead, mercury and other dangerous chemicals. Often referred to as “e-waste,” old electronics have become the fastest growing municipal waste in the United States. They’re completely safe sitting on your desk. But, when e-waste is dumped in landfills, the potentially deadly chemicals can easily absorb into the soil and groundwater, possibly even contributing to different forms of cancer.

This article does a wonderful job of explaining how to properly dispose of seven common electronic components.

1. Recycle your toner cartridges with an office supply store.
2. Recycle your ink-jet cartridges through a fundraising campaign.
3. Donate your computer monitor to a nearby school or charity.
4. Send your old CPU back to the manufacturer for proper disposal.
5. Find a group that properly disposes of old cables, many which can be reused.
6. Contact “Free Geek” for information on who can still use your old mouse or keyboard.
7. Give your old laptop battery to groups who can reuse the different parts.

Total e-waste (toner and ink cartridges, etc): 265 tons
Plastics (converted to energy): 5.2 tons
Used Toner Dust (recycled): 5.4 tons
Office Paper (collected/shredded/recycled): 5.025 tons
Corrugate and other paper products: 113 tons

Be A Good Partner

Be a good partner to your recycling redemption company by following their guidelines. Be sure to:

• Obtain their latest list of accepted cartridges
• Update the list regularly and pass it on to donors
• Sort through donated cartridges and weed out broken and beyond repair units
• Follow the company’s schedule for redemptions and payment
• Follow shipping instructions, and package large donations conveniently for easier processing 

Recruit Donations

Remember that you are not limited to your immediate support base for cartridge donations; you can reach out to other individuals and groups, too. Some good ways to increase donations are by:

• Calling area businesses and asking them to set aside their used ink cartridges; assign someone to pick the cartridges up to make it even easier on the company.
• Encourage your group’s members to collect ink cartridges from their employers, friends, family, and others. You might consider supplying a second outreach letter that can be given to peripheral supporters.
• Set up community collection boxes; attach a letter or sign explaining what can be donated and who will benefit (your group). All you have to do then is regularly check and empty the boxes. Note that some businesses might welcome a drop box at their office, too—they can drop their cartridges in, and so can their employees and clients.

Protect Your Profits

You can ensure that your collections are protected by packaging them well and according to the recycling companies suggestions before shipping; that way, more of your units will be accepted and paid for. Some tips for packaging large shipments of ink cartridges follow:

Lastly, be sure that your packages are labeled correctly so that they get where they are going. If pre-printed materials are provided, use them—they will ensure that the correct addresses and postage are used, and may include an ID number that lets the company know who you are.

You can feel good about this easy recycling ink cartridge fundraising project!

Based in Morristown, NCS helps companies become more sustainable and environmentally conscious by using fully recycled and remanufactured ink and toner products. To meet this goal, it has partnered with InkCycle to provide grenk, a new line of remanufactured ink and toner cartridges designed to leave the smallest environmental footprint possible.

NCS is an environmentally-friendly specialty supplies company that focuses on the ink and toner market. NCS works with purchasing directors and managers to evaluate an organization’s printing and copying expenses and recommend products with optimal quality and cost.

Click here for the full article.

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.

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.

Print Cartridges Get New Life
For InkCycle, a remanufacturer of toner and print cartridges, one could argue that it is inherently green in that it reuses spent cartridges that might otherwise end up in a landfill. That’s certainly true, at least in part, says Brad Roderick, executive vice president. “At the end of the day, we are rebuilding on somebody else’s trash.” He points out, however, that even remanufactured products at some point reach the end of their usable life.

InkCycle, an ink and toner cartridge remanufacturer, has instituted measures to reduce the amount of waste it generates, including implementing a water filtration process for wastewater.

InkCycle’s waste-reduction effort is part of an overall business model that aims to be sustainable. For example, the company is converting its gasoline-powered automotive fleet to hybrid vehicles; pursues a “print less, save the planet” internal campaign; and it has changed many of its manufacturing operations from five shorter days to four longer days to reduce energy usage. On the toner cartridge side, the company has found ways to modify the manufacturing process to reuse the original components a greater number of times. Environmentally friendlier, for sure, but also a cost savings, Roderick notes.

The financial side of sustainability is something Roderick emphasizes. For sustainability to have long-term momentum, “it has to be based on financial considerations,” he says. Introducing more efficient climate control systems that also lower operational expenses over the long term, for example, fit the bill.

The company’s waste-reduction efforts include an on-site wastewater treatment facility to treat the huge amounts of water and steam needed to thoroughly clean and prepare used inkjet cartridges for remanufacturing. It was introduced both because InkCycle “wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing” and as a defensive strategy, Roderick says. He notes that while the company was easily meeting environmental guidelines prior to the treatment facility, legislation could change and rewrite those rules. InkCycle wanted to be ahead of any new regulations.

The wastewater treatment process used by InkCycle is called electrocoagulation. Describing it in simple terms, Roderick says that as wastewater passes through the treatment system, chemicals and solid materials are “shocked” out of the system using electricity and chemistry, with the sediment falling to the bottom of a holding tank. The sludge goes to an EPA-licensed disposal site, while some of the treated water then can be reused in the cleaning process of the used inkjet cartridges.

InkCycle recently introduced a new product line called Grenk, which the company says extends its efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle products that might otherwise end up in landfills. The company has developed a new use for Grenk’s plastic cartridge housings once they have reached the end of their reusable life. It’s as fuel, but not for InkCycle. Instead the company worked with LaFarge North America and its subsidiary Systech Environmental Corp. to turn those plastic housings into fuel for the production of cement.

These Torit filters are made from 100% recycled General Motors filters and paint.
“What they need in the production of cement is a lot of heat. The way they generate that is typically through the burning of fossil fuels, so [they want] material that is of high BTU value,” Roderick says. Given the petroleum-based nature of plastic, InkCycle’s Grenk cartridges proved to be a viable candidate to help the cement furnaces offset some of the fossil fuel needs. The cartridges are disassembled and shredded before they are used as fuel.

The entire Grenk production and packaging process has been developed with environmental sustainability in mind, as well. Indeed, InkCycle says the packaging boxes are made from the highest available content of recycled material and are chain-of-custody certified. Shredded paper in the boxes are the test prints run from each cartridge before they ship. Additional measures help assure that no part of the Grenk product line need end up in a landfill. Of course, a little customer participation is required. “But we make it very easy for them to return [used cartridges].”

InkCycle is quick to admit that attracting new customers is a big driver behind its introduction of Grenk, even as it pursues a sustainable business model. Roderick explains that not only are there thousands of companies that remanufacture printer cartridges, making it a commodity purchase, but also many companies are resistant to even contemplating the purchase of aftermarket products. “But when we learn they have an environmental initiative, it’s one call to the person in charge of their environmental initiative and… there’s almost a 100% opportunity rate of going in and talking to those companies about the green side and the financial side of [remanufactured cartridges].”

InkCycle calculates it has kept 225 tons of waste materials out of landfills through its reuse and recycling efforts in the past year.

Click here for the full article.

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.