Posts Tagged ‘recycling’
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Ink Cartridge Recycling Index to Divert More Than 700 Million Ink Cartridges From Landfills
InkCycle’s new cartridge measurement tool diverted 394 tons of toner and ink cartridges from entering landfills last year (2008).
Ink cartridges are considered e-waste; they are harmful to the environment and can take eons to decompose, according to IdealBite.com (http://www.idealbite.com/tiplibrary/archives/getting-inked). Companies and consumers should recycle their old ones, and when ink cartridges are purchased, go with refilled ones, which work just like conventional cartridges.
According to Brad Roderick, executive vice president of InkCycle, “It’s time consumers and businesses know how much their green initiatives are really saving the planet.”
Read the full story at :http://newsblaze.com/story/2009062210245300002.mwir/topstory.html
Friday, June 19, 2009
InkCycle diverts 394 tons of waste
Did you know that in 2008, InkCycle recycled, re-purposed or converted almost 394 tons of materials from ending up in landfills or other waste avenues!? The 394 tons of waste diverted can be broken down into the following categories:
Total e-waste (toner and ink cartridges, etc): 265 tons
Plastics (converted to energy): 5.2 tons
Used Toner Dust (recycled): 5.4 tons
Office Paper (collected/shredded/recycled): 5.025 tons
Corrugate and other paper products: 113 tons
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
What really happens to print cartridges…
In the next four years, more than 590 million print cartridges will be consumed in North America. Where will they end up?
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.