Top Five Environmental Benefits When Recycling Ink and Toner Cartridges

You may have noticed the ink cartridge recycling boxes set up at your local office supply store. While more and more people are taking advantage of them, approximately 70% of ink cartridges still go straight into the trash. Toner cartridges fair a little better, with only 50% ending up in landfills.With more than 375 million ink cartridges used each year, that is a lot of waste potentially damaging our environment.

It’s bad enough that the plastics used in creating cartridges take several hundred years to degrade; the printer ink can also leak out and cause harm, killing small life such as plants and fish. Leaky toner can cause a problem for humans as well, as the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified carbon black (toner) as a known carcinogen.

When we recycle or refill ink and toner cartridges, we benefit by:

**reducing air and water pollution

**saving of more than 11 million gallons of oil used to create cartridges

**reducing greenhouse gases that are responsible for climate change

**helping conserve natural resources such as water and timber

**helping ensure a healthier environment for our children and their children

Cartridges can be refilled between 5 to 7 times (up to a maximum of 15 times, in extreme cases) before recycling, and almost all the cartridge’s components can be reused. Right now in the United States, recycling efforts are preventing more than 40,000 tons of metal and plastic from going to landfills.Imagine how much more money, space and resources we would have if everyone bought refilled cartridges and took that extra step to recycle them once their service life was completed.