Lately, I’ve been noticing a lot of mailers for ink jet cartridges that offer to recycle them. Walking into Staples the other day, I noticed that they were offering a $1.00 bounty (paid to some educational program) for ink jet cartridges. This has caused me to wonder – are these recycling programs really out of altruistic concern for the ecology to keep our landfills from overflowing with tiny plastic boxes? Or is it a gleaning program for inkjet refillers who need the cartridges? (Or more insidiously, a program by the manufacturers to keep people from refilling cartridges?)
When it comes to companies I seriously doubt you could ever lay pure altruism at their feet. Someway, somehow it makes economic sense for the company (whoever it is) to do that.
There is boat loads of money in the printer ink business. In fact, printer manufacturers make very little if any profit on selling the printer. Their cash flow derives from selling the ink for the printer. My printer at home (pretty good one) costs ~$100 to refill. The whole printer itself cost ~$450.
There is such a premium on ink/toner that refill companies can go to all the trouble of carting in old ink cartridges and doing what needs to be done to them and refillilng them and still sell them for less than a new ink cartridge and still make a profit.
Whether the people paying $1 for old cartridges are ink refillers or printer manufacturers trying to get them off the market or just Staples doing the equivalent of a loss-leader thing to get people in the store I have no clue. Whatever the case it is in their interest to do it and spinning it that they are being good to the environment is just marketing.
As a side note, this business of giving away the printer and then selling the ink has led to the following absurdity – with the current rebates, it was cheaper for me to buy a new printer than buy new ink refills.
Crazy isn’t it? It’s the old, “Give away the razor, sell the blades!” thing but as you mentioned it can occasionally lead to absurd results.
Another similar type of thing was a friend of mine buying two roundtrip airline ticket more cheaply than he could buy two one-way tickets (he flew one place, drove to another and flew out of there). I think airlines got wise to that one awhile ago and have put a stop to it but it’s still nuts…
However, I think they’ve caught on to the “buy a new printer when it goes dry” idea as a lot of the newer printers only come with a “starter” supply of ink, rather than the standard size ink cartridges…
They certainly make a profit off of it. IIRC next to the standard brand name print cartridges at Office Depot were their refurbished/refilled ones for about 20% less.
Office Depots in my town give either a free ream of recycled printer paper or a $2 discount when you turn in an empty HP or Epson (and maybe another brand) ink cartridge.
Unfortunately I use cartridges at a faster rate than paper, so I’m sitting beside a pile of 24 reams of unused paper that I got “free”. Plus I won a case of 10 reams in a trivia contest and I’ve been carrying it around in my car trunk for about a year. The “used” paper is in several othr piles waiting for me to read again, sort, file, send, publish, or put to some other intended use.
Let’s see, the HP cartridges I use hold 0.64 floz and cost about $25 so if my frigonometry is correct, 100 times that is 2 quarts and that would cost $2500, or $5,000 per gallon. Expensive “free” paper.
Pencil ensues.
If they’re paying for it, it’s probably a remanufacturer trying to get a supply of empties.
Or it could be the OEM trying to get their cartridges back so that aftermarket people won’t refill them.
I’ve been in the laser toner cartridge remanufacturing business for 15 years. I pay out a few dollars for empty laser cartridges so that I’ll have empties in stock…I get exchanges for almost all of the toners I sell but they do reach a point of no longer being reusable (they get dropped and banged up, and the screws that hold things together eventually strip out).
HP on the other hand includes a postage paid shipping label with each new cartridge so that the end-user will send it back to them, and so I won’t get ahold of it.
As far as concern for the environment, I’ve never had any luck with promoting remanufactured cartridges with that approach. My customers couldn’t give a flying crap about that. They just want to save 30-60%.
On a side note, small remanufacturers like me DO keep a lot of plastic out of landfills. I estimate that I’ve personally kept around 20,000 laser cartridges out of the landfills…that’s a LOT of plastic.