Churches, schools and recycling companies often seem to be looking for people to donate their used ink cartridges, because they can sell them to…whoever…and make money.
My question is: What is the allure of used ink cartridges? Why are they valuable?
Guessing that they will have them refilled and then resold.
They can be reused.
Really? I didn’t know that.
There are companies whose entire business model is built on refilling ink cartridges.
In the old days of computers, an ink cartridge was just that - a cartridge that contained ink. The ink was fed into the print head (the thing that actually put the ink onto the paper), which was a permanent part of the printer.
These days, the “ink cartridge” contains the print head as well. The ink inside of it is fairly cheap, and the print head usually doesn’t wear out after a single cartridge’s worth of printing. The cartridge can be refilled very inexpensively (if you have the right tools) and sold for a very high profit.
Many printers use carts that only hold ink and have a separate print head. Canon and Kodak are major ones. I’ve been refilling Canon carts for many years. Refilling carts with print heads is very limited. You can’t depend on more than a few refills if that. But this is also why there is a demand for those only used one time.
A brand-new print cartridge from the company itself costs 70 Euros about, and you need 1 black, 1 reddish, 1 blue-ish and 1 yellow. (That’s also why the printer itself costs only 20-40 Euros: the cartridges in it are half-filled for “demonstration” and quickly run out, forcing you to buy new carts. The printer itself costs much more in production, but the companies know they can hook people with cheap starting costs and then force them to buy expensive supplies.)
Companies like Pelican and others who tried to make their own generic cartridges quickly found that one cartridge can contain up to 70 patented items, which makes re-building (reverse manufacturing) hard to impossible, and buying the patents expensive.
So instead, they start a bonus program, where people who send in empty carts. for re-filling with cheaper ink and selling as re-filled carts. get credits. The companies get carts. still cheaper than building their own; the customers get the re-filled carts for cheaper than the original ones. Everybody wins.
Schools and churches are very good targets because they can use the extra money and they have lots of people therefore lots of potential cartridges.
Really smart and cost-consious people buy a laser printer which costs 1000 Euros first, but then needs a new toner every 5 000 pages, instead of new cartridges every 500 pages. Or goes to a copy shop where 1 page costs 0,05 Euros.
Re-used ink cartridges will soon be worthless.
The printer manufacturers have become wise to this secondary market of cartridge refillers and they have developed a counter-measure. Ink tanks now have an RFID chip in them. Once the printer reads them as empty, you can fill them as many times as you would like but your printer will always read them as empty. So now you’ve paid good money for a product that you should be able to use but can’t. What do you do? Go back to the manufacturer with a willingness to spend the difference so that your printer will work again. Avoid refills like the plague because it’s just throwing money away. Clever, no?
That’s been there for a while now. It’s pretty easy to thwart. Most ink refill places know how to do it.
Epson too, I think - largely because they had a different print head technology to the others (piezoelectric vs thermal bubble) which made the print heads more expensive to manufacture. Not sure if that’s still entirely true now.
No, not clever. Not an RFID-chip, but a real computer chip monitoring the amount of ink and telling it to the printer has been used by most manufacturers for several years, possibly a decade by now.
The counter-solution is of course a software that allows either the computer owner or the re-filling company to re-set the chip or to tell the computer to ignore what the chip is saying. Several those programs are available on the internet in printer forums.
Even if they don’t deal directly in the refilling and re-selling, your school group may simply cash them in at the local office supply shop’s exchange program. OfficeMax will credit your Max Perks account $3.00 for each cartridge you bring in. Think you can only redeem 20 per month, but if multiple teachers have Max Perks accounts, they can easily get around that limitation.
My husband reman’s ink cartridges and often buys empties. His business was doing big $'s a few years back, when he started it, (needed something he could work out of the house), but now it’s a part time thing at best. He buys the maufacturers inks, has a zillion printers, tons of paper, and is often covered in ink himself.
I think, right from the very beginning, it was self evident to people, that a lot of the cost was in the cartridge, itself. His customers get about a 45% savings on buying new. Many are businesses that print a lot of things, so they burn through cartridges.
On the upside, I print full page, colour photos by the zillions, just because I can. I print my own Christmas cards and tons of stuff for my friends and family. I never run out of ink!
I’m wondering how the business will develop, now that 1000 Dollar colour laser printer have been available for a few years. With the last incentive of colour gone, switching to laser makes most financial sense, even for small businesses; private users are smarter if they print colour pictures (photos) elsewhere anyway, and private colour prints are often still more expensive than from a copy shop due to volume.
I guess it will stay low-level with people too stupid to calculate falling for the “40 Euros for a colour inkjet printer at the local discount store” angle, and the rest moving on to lasers once the inkjet have been written off or gone broke.
In Europe at least, ink cartridges esp. with the new computer chips can still be worth something, even if not for refilling: the more complex they are - with seperate print head plus computer chip - the more electronics and rare metals they have that are worth harvesting, esp. with the rise of metal prices.
Really…
I currently own 3 inkjet printers, none of which have a print head in their cartridges. Two of which are Epson and the other is a Kodak.
EarlyMan
Color laser printers have dropped way below a thousand dollars. You can get them for 2-300 dollars now. Note that at that price, they’re relatively slow, and the replacement cartridges are expensive. Like $7-80 each, and you need four of them.
In private homes and small offices, speed is really not the issue, cost is.
And if the replacement cartridges still last 5 000 pages (like lasers usually do) compared to 500 pages of inkjet, it’s still worth the cost even at 80$ each, since inkjet cartridges cost just as much too.
In my case, the reason to have a home printer (at Mom’s) is printing quality. Theoretically, the printers at local businesses which offer printing services are better. They offer all these supports: puzzles, photo paper, handbags… most of them don’t offer printing a regular document on regular paper, though 
, and the one which does doesn’t work on weekends (when we’d be most likely to buy a train ticket, which you have to print out).
Sadly, I haven’t found one where the workers can print decently. You have to bring pictures which are the exact shape of the support, or they will print the most unexpected piece; pictures of people are printed with someone’s face chopped off, pictures of statues get printed from a corner… apparently these people are too stupid to do something which even my technophobic 71yo mother has learned to use IrfanView for.
I don’t know how long will we find cartridges for the printer, and what will the available technology be then - but unless the local prints market gets better, we will be getting another printer.