*NEWS*AUSTRALIA TROWS AWAY 18M TONER CTGS

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Printer tells government to get serious on waste
DAVID Finn, managing director of printer-maker Kyocera Mita Australia, thinks the country is a long way behind global best practice when it comes to waste management.”We’re very lax in Australia, and I think the Federal Government has got to be accountable for it,” Mr Finn says, citing European rules on reducing hazardous materials in products that are not mandatory in Australia.Mr Finn is no less scathing of state governments, describing the NSW Government as “atrocious”, in part for its decision to drop environmental considerations from big information technology orders.Japanese-based Kyocera says toners for its laser printers are cheaper to replace than rivals’ and also dissolve into water vapor in 30 years when discarded, compared with 900 years for those made by competitors. Even so, it has lost contracts to rivals to supply printers for “literally 50¢” cheaper.”We’ve had many meetings with the NSW State Government,” he said. “We ask: ‘Why buy other brands with the toner problem?’ They say: ‘We don’t care.’ They’ve got a capital budget and a recurrent budget for the consumable. There’s no care and that’s the problem.”

Australia throws away about 18 million toner cartridges a year, or enough to fill the MCG to a depth of five metres, Mr Finn says.Among contracts that Kyocera missed out on were those from state environmental protection bodies, although it did win an order from the Austin Health Group, which runs the Austin Hospital.”The corporate world is taking this far more seriously than the Government,” Mr Finn said.Another advantage claimed by Kyocera is that its printers produce lower carbon dioxide emissions. “Everything’s engineered down to produce less waste,” he said.

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June 12, 2007 at 2:01 PM