I gathered some eye-opening facts about toner and ink jet cartridges that I thought would be interesting to share:
- I have seen estimates, by Epson and others, that a discarded printer cartridge can take anywhere from 450 to 1000 years to completely decompose. In other words, they don’t ever decompose.
- At least 350 million cartridges are thrown away each year.
- 3 cartridges per second are thrown away in the US alone.
- Epson also estimates that ink cartridges could maintain a useful life that is 10 times longer than the current life expectancy. (In other words, the technology exists to make cartridges that hold more ink, they just don’t.)
- It takes almost an entire gallon of oil to make one new toner cartridge.
- It takes over half a gallon of oil to make an ink jet cartridge.
- In 7 months, cartridge remanufacturing will save more oil than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Prince Edward Sound, Alaska.
- Stacked end to end, cartridges thrown away in one year would cover a distance of over 24,000 miles- enough to circle the earth.
- In the next seven years, if the all laser and inkjet cartridges to be (hopefully) saved from landfills were stacked end to end, it would stretch from the Earth to the Moon-223,000 miles!
- Approximately 90% of printing cartridges are recyclable but only 20% are being recycled.
- 95% of all inkjet cartridges are thrown away. That’s more than 1,000,000 a day-5,000 tons of plastic and metal tossed into landfills every month.
As I said, it’s eye opening.
source: imagine it recycling
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