There is a real environmental battle in place, it is one which you can help with. How about those empty toner cartidges from your laser printer. You can reduce your carbon footprint by starting to reuse them.
Remember the mantra for our day has to “reduce, reuse and recycle”
The very simple fact is that it’s easy to save valuable resources, for instance start filling up your laser toner cartridges for instance. In Europe there are nearly 50 million laser cartridges bought each year, 95% of these only get used once. Considering each new cartridge takes between 1 and 2 litres of oil to produce, that’s a lot of waste.
These cartridges very often end up as landfill, thousands of tons all across the planet. The materials don’t exactly decompose quickly either, the plastics are usually non-biodegradable. Every single time you reuse a cartridge you save on waste landfill.
Don’t throw these cartridges away or even send off to the many ‘so-called’ environmentally friendly remanufacture schemes, designed to simple make the company look good nothing more. Remember these empty toner cartridges all used to come with a little stopper which you could use to refill with compatible toner ink, now that’s eco friendly. However the printng companies realised they were missing out on a huge source of revenue here – so they removed them.
There are many companies who can provide you with simple kits which can refill most empty toner cartridges. Many of these cartidges can be refilled 4 or 5 times with no real problems and each time you are saving up to 87% of the cost of a new laser toner cartridge.
All you need is one of the kits and some compatible toner to refill it, most cases it’s a 5 minute job, and requires no real skill. Have a look at my refill toner review page to see how easy it is. Empty toner cartridges still work they just have run out of ink so just refill them.
Remember they’re not broken, not faulty, merely empty. If you notice a little plug or stopper on your cartridge, it means that your toner is one of the lucky few and is designed to be refilled. Just buy some replacement toner and refill the empty cartridge.
Other cartridges need you to create a refiller hole but it’s very simple with the right kit anyone can do this. You don’t need to tamper with the cartridge itself (as you have to in remanufacturing), so there’s little that can go wrong. You’re just filling it up with ink, have a look at this Refill Toner Review .
They won’t damage your printer, and you can refill the cartridge until you see a deteriation in the print quality and then buy a new one. You will save hundreds of dollars and reduce environmental impact significantly.
Imagine if every one did this, saving millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands less toner cartridges being produced and thrown away. So explore this possibility and please don’t throw away those empty toner cartridges, refill them and save some money.
