Thursday, April 05, 2007

Recycling cartridges

We recently bought a fantastic new printer for FocoLoco. The Epson stylus photo R2400....This thing is RAD. Large format, archival ink....beautiful quality.
The only bummer is that you can't send in the cartridges for recycling!!
Over the past few years we've gotten so used to recycling the ones from our HP photosmart that I was kinda dumbfounded by this...I assumed that ALL cartridges were reusable.
What makes this an even bigger bummer is that this printer uses 9, yes, NINE cartridges. That leaves a whole lot of empty cartridges to deal with.
They can kind of be recycled by being ground down and melted to make packing materials, but most cartridge centers will no longer accept them because they already have way too many and more than they can even use.
"However, we do appreciate that it uses more energy to transport, sort and crush these cartridges than can be recouped by recycling." -Print4less-

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi - I've just purchased the same printer. I nearly didn't due to the problems of recycling them. However I've discovered this artcile http://cartridges4charity.co.uk/epsons.htm

You can send the cartridges back to Epson themselves. I spoke to Epson Customer Care you readily admitted that they could be sent and they would be reused.

Editor said...

thanks for the info!

Fergus Ross Ferrier said...

Further to Matthew's comment:

I'm from Cartridges4Charity.co.uk - as we've just updated our site, I'd just point out that though we cannot take Epson cartridges [and some others], we do have an 'alternative solutions guide' for those we cannot use.

Though of course we can reuse many other brands and models of cartridge.