KEEPING CARTRIDGES OUT OF LANDFILL

[Anonymous]

Keeping cartridges out of the landfill
Dartmouth company finds success recycling.
When
Don MacKinnon started recycling printer ribbons 15 years ago, he didn’t
get into it to save the planet. He saw it as an opportunity to make a
buck.”I saw niche,” said the president of Ribbons Recycled Inc. “People
were throwing away mountains of printer ribbon and it occurred to me
there might be a way to re-ink and reuse them. It was all about the
cost factor. The emphasis on the environment came later.”The early
experiments with re-inking the ribbon fabric began in the bathroom of
his Dartmouth home. It took a while to figure out how to do it
efficiently with oil-based inks, but he said like any good
entrepreneur, he never gave up.Once he had perfected the technique he
began collecting the used ribbon from businesses and reselling
customers refurbished units at a discounted rate. As the business grew
he hired staff to carry out the refurbishing and remanufacturing.When
ribbon technology gave way to ink-jet cartridges, Mr. MacKinnon
developed a way to reuse those. And now as ink-jet cartridges are
making way for their laser printer cousins, they too are being recycled.

But
Mr. MacKinnon is quiet about the company’s success. He grudgingly shows
off his spacious 9,000-square-foot Dartmouth warehouse where 10
employees refurbish and then test more than 5,000 cartridges a
month.Another dozen to 15 workers are on the road selling and
collecting cartridges from commercial clients, or working with the
public through the company’s 10 retail Inkjet X-Change locations
scattered throughout the region.”There are a number of companies that
are recycling ink-jets or laser cartridges in the province, but most do
it as a sideline to something else. As far as I know, we are the only
company devoted to doing it full time.”

Mr. MacKinnon said he
long ago gave up trying to guess how many tonnes of plastic and metals
his business has diverted from the landfill, but environmental websites
in the U.S. estimate that every year over 300 million ink-jet
cartridges are thrown away. Stacked from end to end, this would extend
for more than 39,000 kilometres — enough to circle the earth.No one in
Nova Scotia tracks those kinds of numbers, but Mr. MacKinnon knows
there are a lot more that could be diverted. He suggests his business
and those like his still only keep one in 10 cartridges out of the
landfill.”I know they don’t like them at the landfill. There’s a nasty
pop of black ink when they are crushed.”With proper care, he said a
cartridge can be successfully refilled several times, but eventually
cartridges will fail for reasons other than being out of ink. He said
they are surprisingly fragile and manufacturers are making them
increasingly difficult to reuse.

Island Ink Jet is another
company that helps keep ink cartridges out of the landfill by offering
refurbishing services. At various times the company has had as many as
three locations around Halifax, but the lone location at the moment is
at Mic Mac Mall. Graham McEwan is the franchise holder.Island Ink Jet
is a North American franchise with close to 230 locations.This is the
second in a series of Small Business Week stories looking at Nova
Scotia companies finding a green niche.

[Author]

October 17, 2007 at 12:16 PM