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.