*NEWS*16MIL GALONS OF OIL TO REMAN INKJET

[Anonymous]

Reduce litter, recycling printer cartridges

Island Ink-Jet at the New Sudbury Shopping Mall is commemorating Earth Day by offering printer users an environmentally friendly way to refill empty printer cartridges instead of throwing them out. Island Ink-Jet sales representative Selena Goodman at the New Sudbury Shopping Centre. With over 60,000 cartridges filled to date, this local business is doing its part for environmental conservation. Refilling a cartridge rather than replacing it conserves oil that would otherwise be used to manufacture a new cartridge. Refilling a cartridge instead of disposing of it helps reduce the space strain in landfills. Consider the environmental costs of treating printer cartridges as disposable items: – 2.5 ounces of oil are used to manufacture every ink-jet cartridge. At the current rate of approximately 839 million ink cartridge shipments yearly, that represents more than 16 million gallons of oil every year. – 3.5 quarts of oil are used to manufacture every laser toner cartridge. At the current rate of 188 million laser toner cartridge shipments yearly, that translates into more than 5 million gallons of oil every year. – Every year over 300 million cartridges go into the landfills in North America alone. The total weight of those cartridges is equivalent to more than 30,500 African elephants. – An ink cartridge can take over 1,000 years to decompose. – Stacked from end to end, cartridges thrown away in one year would cover a distance of over 24,000 miles – enough to circle the earth. Island Ink-Jet is not only environmentally friendly, it’s also cost effective. Printer users can cut the cost of buying a new cartridge by 60 percent on the first refill alone. Each $15 refill saves $30 over the typical $45 ink-jet cartridge. With the average printer guzzling 3.5 to 4.5 cartridges worth of ink on an annual basis and up to 15 refills before a given cartridge needs to replaced, that can add up to hundreds of dollars in savings over time. Most consumers do not realize that their printer cartridge can be refilled, let alone refilled up to five times, if properly taken care of.

[Author]

April 28, 2005 at 10:46 AM