If you have an unused toner cartridge, it might be tempting to just throw it away.
Though, according to the EPA, it takes up to three quarts of oil to make a single printer cartridge and the plastic that cartridges contain can take generations to decompose in a landfill.
On top of that, ink from cartridges can leak and pollute the environment.
Certainly there’s a better way.
There are definitely benefits of recycling ink cartridges, so you may be tempted to turn to toner recycling programs. But those actually have a number of setbacks if your cartridge is unused and unopened in its original packaging.
You may not be able to make as much money on them by recycling, the reuse process has its limits and many reclaim programs can’t be done completely online.
Below we’ll look in depth at these issues and explore why a toner buyback program is your best bet for unused and unopened cartridges.
We live in a world that tells us there’s really no such thing as easy money. But if you have unused toner cartridges, it is a way to make some quick cash in a fast and easy manner.
Our process for selling toner cartridges really couldn’t be any easier. You simply fill out a form detailing the brand of the toner, the toner model number and the quantity.
Someone gets back to you offering what we can pay for your toner cartridges. If you accept, we pay via PayPal or company check through mail.
It really is quick cash in your pocket.
On the other hand, many of the traditional recycling programs offer more limited means of reimbursement.
For instance, Best Buy gives a $2 store coupon and 15 percent off ink purchases through the My Best Buy loyalty program. Customers are also limited to five cartridges under this offer, and only one coupon can be used for every $40 of new ink or toner.
Staples gives back $2 in Staples Rewards for each cartridge turned in, if you’ve spent a minimum of $30 on ink or toner over the last 180 days. Toner recycling is far from the easy cash of a buyback program.
There are limits to recycling toner cartridges
While there are benefits of recycling ink cartridges, reuse programs also work best for used cartridges. If a program uses closed-loop recycling, like HP’s ink cartridge program, it makes no sense for a perfectly good cartridge.
Closed-loop recycling simply means that raw materials from old cartridges are broken down to be used in new ones. A great idea for used cartridges, not so much for unopened, pristine ones.
The County of Kaua’i’s governmental website describes what happens to used cartridges the county receives: they are sent off for re-manufacture, meaning they’re disassembled, inspected, repaired, put back together, filled and inspected again.
It simply wouldn’t be logical to submit an unused cartridge to such a process.
Reusing products makes sense most of the time, like when you’re done with a milk carton or you’re done reading a physical newspaper because you’re old school like that. But recycling itself does have some drawbacks.
Reutilizing plastic, one of the main components in an ink cartridge, isn’t the infinite process you’d think it is. That’s because plastic has fibers, like paper, which shorten each time something is recycled.
The Auckland Council states that plastic can be reused about seven to nine times before it becomes too degraded.
Granted, one of the benefits of recycling ink cartridges is that it’s much better to get those seven to nine lives out of plastic, rather than just consigning it to a long lifetime in a landfill right off the bat. But that doesn’t mean it would make sense to go reclaiming unused products willy-nilly.
Then there are political forces that get in the way of reusing products. Back in 2013 it was reported that much of U.S. plastic wasn’t actually getting recycled.
That was because China put up what’s called the “Green Fence” in an effort to reduce pollution.
It’s a policy that bans import of anything but the most highly organized and most clean bales of reusable trash. Some types of trash are banned completely.
That means recycling has to happen here, rather than shipping it to cheap labor overseas. Considering how many products are produced in China, the old system would have reusable materials sorted out of our trash overseas and rerouted right back into the manufacturing of goods.
Resin from our plastic materials is especially valuable in the manufacturing process. This meant China actually used two-thirds of the U.S.’s used plastic each year, which accounted for billions of dollars.
Yet it wasn’t a perfect situation. Anything that couldn’t be used was put in China’s trash mountains and many of the recycling processors would pollute heavily, despite being part of the reuse model.
This isn’t to shame the recycling industry. It doesn’t mean that reusing materials is senseless, and we should just ditch it as a system.
What tricky foreign affairs means is an opportunity for domestic efforts to take up the slack, creating jobs and other business opportunities. So that is one of the benefits of recycling ink cartridges.
Yet it’s more of a reason to not put stress on the sometimes-fragile recycling industry. Especially when selling gets you straight cash, and the process itself can be so easy.
We’re definitely proponents of recycling used toner instead of throwing it away. When it comes to new unopened toner though, it just makes more sense to sell it to a toner buyback company.
You’re not only preventing it from going through the arduous process of recycling but also allowing it to be sold to someone else who needs and will use the toner.
Chances are, they’ll even be purchasing the printer toner at less than retail price.
It’s a win-win for everyone.
Many toner recycling programs also require you to drop off your cartridges at a physical location.
A search through the popular cartridge recycling program database at Earth911 simply yields a list of addresses, mostly at electronics, office or toner stores. Many listings state that you should call for further information.
But with Toner Connect, you simply fill out your form detailing what you have, get your offer and approve the offer. Then you’ll receive a pre-paid shipping label through email to print.
Simply ship us your toner cartridges for free and your cash is on its way. So if you have unused toner cartridges, get selling today!
