Ink cartridges are some of the most used and bought supplies by computer users. Since in the past years, the bustle of environmental protection has gotten to everyone and printing is not considered the most sustainable activity there is, due to the large amount of paper but also ink usage. However, over 1.1 billion inkjet cartridges are used annually all over the world. Laying them end to end and making a comparison, this would be 129 times longer than the Great Wall of China (and, for the record, could circle the Earth about three times). For this reason, an Australian ink cartridges online supplier has considerable sales during one year, and the effects this has on the environment are not to be neglected. Each year, more than 375 million empty toner and ink cartridges for printers are thrown away, and this means about 1,000,000 cartridges per day, which by division leads us to 11 cartridges per second. Seems that it takes approximately 1000 years for these to decompose in the nature, which is why recycling companies have a special place for these items, which are normally stored and reused: plastic and metal components are further separated and used as raw material to create furniture or other useful objects.

The huge amount of wasted material can become useful due to well established recycling systems, since more than 60% of the used toner cartridge are not recycled yet. It has been proven that the cartridges recycled only in Europe within a year (around 17 million) are worth the money paid for about 6 million litres of virgin oil. Apart from the materials composing them (plastic and metal), which are barely decomposed naturally, ink is also likely to cause pollution, and thus making cartridges even more “dangerous” than they seem at first sight. By penetrating the soil, ink can cause serious harm to the flora and fauna for certain areas, not to mention that carbon black is considered one of the most toxic solutions, very likely to cause cancer. A lot of resources are used to create a cartridge, but this problem has been figured out, because more than 30% of the items sold on the market are remanufactured. Another think less popular is that generally consumers pay more to refill the ink cartridges for printers in the first year after purchasing them, than they spend on the devices themselves.

Even if all the environmental organizations and media channels claim that recycling is good and beneficial for the Earth, reusing cartridges is a practice whose advantages are not acknowledged by everyone. First of all, this may reduce pollution considerably (water and air, they are both affected by tertiary materials), through incineration or remanufacturing. Besides this, reusing the raw materials in the creation of new items can preserve natural resources, for instance timber, oil, petroleum or minerals, helping thus to save energy. The climate change is also affected by this: global warmth is diminished by the lower emission of greenhouse gases, which is a critical element for the sustainability of the following generations.

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