After an after-hours check of employee computers, Google implemented an educational program to help employees understand the energy benefits of powering down their computers at night. This is a low-cost way to save Google money and reduce the company’s carbon footprint.

Google’s removal of employee trash cans is an ingenious idea. It costs nothing for a business to remove the item and direct employees to a centralized disposal/recycling location. This one little step led to a significant increase in recycling rates at the company, 50 percent, and helps Google meet its green initiative goals.

What do you think? Would this make you more likely to recycle? Is this something you could implement at home?

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.

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That’s why we created the Carbon Neutronics Index. It’s a proprietary software program that we share with those who purchase and use grenk products. It helps customers calculate the tonnage they’re keeping out of landfills by choosing grenk.

Far too many businesses don’t get the credit they deserve for their exo-initiative. The Carbon Neutronics Index makes it easy to track and record the effect one company can make in reducing landfill waste and keeping cartridges in circulation for reuse.

It’s also a great tool for comparing the cost difference of using remanufactured grenk cartridges over original manufacturer print cartridges, and can provide measurable case studies to help customers build support for other environmental initiatives while improving their bottom line.

Carbon Neutronics™ is made up of three words: Carbon + Neutral + Electronics. CNI makes it easy to track and record the effect one company can make in reducing landfill waste and keeping cartridges in circulation for reuse. The Carbon Neutronics™ Index was created to provide companies with an accurate account of their potential e-waste that has been diverted by using grenk™ products.

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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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.

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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.