Toner Cartridge Recycling: Tips On What To Do With Your Empty Printer Cartridges 🖨️

Toner Cartridge Recycling 🖨️: After using up all the ink and emptying your office printer cartridge, what do you usually with it after? Do you throw it in your rubbish bin? Do you put it in the single-stream recycling bin? Or do you keep them in your home because you don’t know what to do with them and don’t want to risk sending them to a landfill? Well, let me help you with that! I will discuss everything here.

---

>Download Now: Free PDF Business Owners Guide To Commingled Recycling Bin Services

---

A bit about Waster

Before we discuss the topic of toner cartridge recycling, let me share with you more information about Waster.

We here at Waster provide you with innovative solutions for your and your business’s waste management and recycling needs. Furthermore, we provide flexible, 30-day contracts instead of the typical lock-in contracts, which proves to be better.

Click the blue button to learn more.

---

READ: Can You Recycle Tin Cans? 🥫

---

How can you recycle toner cartridges?

According to Planet Ark, Australians throw away more than 18 million cartridges every year. This, in turn, leads to approximately 5,000 tonnes of non-biodegradable waste. As a result, they spearheaded the Cartridges 4 Planet Ark, which aims to provide Australians with a free and easy way of recycling their used toner cartridges.

Where to recycle toner cartridges near me

If you have empty laser and inkjet cartridges, you can drop them off at your nearest Officeworks stores. Additionally, you can also drop them off at other participating outlets such as Australia Post, Cartridge World, Harvey Norman, The Good Guys, JB Hi-Fi, Office National, and Office Depot. Accepted items include the following:

• Inkjet cartridges
• Toner cartridges
• Toner bottles
• Fuser and drum kits
• Fax rolls
• Print heads
• waste hoppers/containers and kits

Furthermore, this includes cartridges used in printers, photocopiers, and fax machines. They have already recycled an astounding 44 million cartridges! What a valiant effort by Australians, indeed!

But even though these numbers are high enough to consider successful, there are still many millions of cartridges ending up in landfill every year. Still, I have no doubt in my mind that there will come a future where when everyone exerts their efforts in recycling toner cartridges, we will see less and less of them being in a landfill. “Slowly but surely”, as they say!

How can I obtain a recycling box?

Cartridges 4 Planet Work installed many collection boxes from thousands of different corporate and government firms and schools in Australia, nationwide. If you happen to find a collection box from where you work you can bring your empty cartridges from home and drop them off into your workplace collection box.

But what if you want to recycle your ink cartridge and no collection box is within your work area? Do not worry; if your workplace utilises three or more toner cartridges, toner bottles, or inkjet cartridges every month, you can get yourself a Cartridges 4 Planet Ark box that you can put in your workplace. You will never have to worry about recycling your empty toner cartridges if you have this in your area!

Impact of a printer’s toner cartridge on the environment

According to Energy Central, 11 cartridges per second and 1 million cartridges are thrown away globally – all at insane rates.  A statement from their blog says:

Ink printers and their ink are made up of several ingredients, with most of them being chemicals that have the potential to be damaging to you and the environment. Some of these include butyl urea, which prevents your paper from curling; cyclohexanone, which helps ink adhere to polymers; several dyes including reactive red 23 dye, acid yellow 23 dye and direct blue 199 dye, which contains sulphur; ethoxylated acetylenic diols which modify the surface tension of the water and colours; Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) which is full of contaminants and ethylene glycol.

The harmful environmental factors of ink cartridges can be felt since they are manufactured. When you produce a new laser cartridge, you consume more than three quarts of oil. For inkjet cartridges, you require about three ounces of oil.

Additionally, it takes so long for cartridges to decompose. Some suggest that it takes about 1,000 years for it to fully decompose in a landfill site. This gives you a view of how damaging these cartridges are to the environment.

One more damaging effect of cartridges, again stated by Energy Central, is the toner being classified as a potential carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. If you do not know what carcinogenic means; it means that it can cause cancer. So trust me when I say that you are better off recycling your discarded toner cartridges instead of throwing them into a landfill.

What About Its Carbon Footprint?

Unsurprisingly, much like other materials, making new cartridges from raw materials uses up many natural resources and emits around 4.8kg of Carbon Dioxide, the most potent greenhouse gas, per cartridge. But, this only includes the cartridge itself. It does not take into account the toner that is inside.

We can only hope to lessen – or better yet remove – carbon emissions by recycling toner cartridges.

Speaking of carbon footprint, have you heard of Waster’s charitable partnership with Greenfleet? We decided to help in reducing carbon emissions by teaming up with them!

Toner cartridge recycling: conclusion

If you wish to recycle – or repurpose – your empty ink cartridges, take a look at the official website of Planet Ark. Toner cartridges, along with other e-waste materials, are detrimental to the health of the environment and should be properly disposed of or recycled, depending on its recyclability.

Additionally, if you wish to read more blogs such as this, why not read our blog on 3d printing material recycling or CD recycling? Maybe you might learn something new!

Waster: things you need to know

If you’re looking for recycling bins, check our waste recycling shop and find the best deals in terms of pricing and services. Check our medical waste disposal for more information.

Also, please call 1300 WASTER (1300 927 837), or email us at [email protected] if you have any further questions.