Barry Shultz

Recycling Inkjet Cartridges

Here are a few facts about inkjet cartridges:

• Over 375,000,000 Empty Inkjet Cartridges Dumped Each Year.
• Statistics reveal that only 5% of all empty inkjet cartridges are currently
  being recycled. 
• E-mail has increased the amount of paper used in offices by almost 40%. 
• Plastics used in inkjet cartridges can take over 10 centuries (1000 years!) to decompose
• 90ml of oil is used to produce each inkjet cartridge.
• In the last six months alone, inkjet cartridge recycling has saved more than 50 million liters of oil. This is more oil than what was tragically spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.
• Empty inkjet cartridges are THE most valuable post-consumer item.
  (http://www.empty-inkjet-cartridges.com)

There are lots of companies on the internet that will buy your empty inkjet cartridges. This is an excellent opportunity for raising fund money for any organization from Boy Scouts to baseball teams or to just put a few bucks back in your pocket. This is not chump change either. Some companies are paying $6.50 and more for one cartridge. Collect a bunch of these and you can make some serious money. Laser cartridges can fetch up to $25 each

Most of the companies that will buy your empty cartridges will also pay for any postage charges that you incur.

Inkjet brokers just can't get enough cartridges fast enough to supply the many recyclers that are starting up. They have to rely on people like you and me to keep them supplied.

Now keep in mind that they do not buy just any cartridge. They are mostly interested in those cartridges that contain print heads, like HP, Lexmark, Dell, Some Canon, Apple, Some Brother, Sharp and older Xerox cartridges.

The reason is because cartridges that are just ink tanks, i.e. the print head is permanently mounted in the printer, are cheap for the generic market to reproduce. So there is no profit in commercially refilling them.

Also, in order to keep the highest quality, they are mostly interested in virgin cartridges, those that have never been refilled. You may find some companies buying once refilled cartridges but at a substantially lower price. Many will just tell you up front that they must be virgin cartridges.

These empty cartridge buyers are easy to find. Just do a Google search something like this, "we buy empty inkjet cartridges". I got over 95,000 results with that search.

This company will supply everything you need for fundraisers.
http://www.inkbank.com

Here are some others that will buy your cartridges:

http://www.cartridgesareus.com
http://www.webuyempties.com
http://www.tonerbuyer.com
http://www.fundraisingweb.org/listings/recycles.htm

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