You may not give much thought to that little printer cartridge that you throw away when it’s empty, but with over 300 million cartridges being purchased each year (and about 85% of those being thrown away instead of recycled), these cartridges take up huge amounts of space in our landfills.

Each toner cartridge contains an average of 3-1/2 pounds of plastic and metal, and requires 3-1/2 quarts of oil to manufacture. Even small inkjet cartridges weigh a couple of ounces each, and it takes 1 quart of oil to manufacture the plastic used in the cartridge. By choosing remanufactured options, customers save money and, more importantly, valuable natural resources.

When a used cartridge is returned for reprocessing, it is inspected for possible reuse. The process for every cartridge is different, but in general terms, if it passes the inspection, it is disassembled, cleaned, refurbished by replacing worn parts, filled with new ink or toner, and tested before final packaging. It is then sold back to the customer, who is saving money and also helping the environment. Toner cartridges that fail inspection are separated into their separate components for recycling, and the plastic shell is ground down and used in other products such as park benches.

When you’re ready to get rid of that old computer, monitor, printer, or related electronic waste, don’t discard it in your household trash. Instead, make sure it gets reused or recycled by taking it to an electronic waste collection center. When customers bring these items in, they typically send them on to a recycling facility that breaks them down into their various components for reclamation. For instance, with a used computer, the outer case will be sent to a scrap metal facility, plastic parts will be sent to a plastics processor, and the internal electronic components will be sent to a facility that melts down the circuit boards to reclaim precious metals.

To be most effective, remember that it is much better to reduce use or reuse products whenever possible. Within our own office we follow many procedures to cut down on office waste. Here are a few tips we follow that can help you reduce, reuse and recycle in your office as well.

For office paper:
* Reduce: request that documents be e-mailed instead of faxed or mailed, including receiving and paying bills electronically whenever possible.
* Reuse: Make a tray for single-sided non-confidential printouts that can be re-used for printing internal documents on their reverse side.
* Recycle: Recycle paper that cannot be reused, along with envelopes, catalogs, and magazines.

For cardboard:
* Reduce: Consolidate orders from vendors, so shipments arrive in as few boxes as possible.
* Reuse: Reuse boxes and packing materials from incoming shipments for outgoing shipments as much as possible.
* Recycle: Boxes that cannot be reused should be put in the recycling bin.