Cartridges are made up of plastics, metals, foam, ink and toner: these components take up to 100 years to decompose, causing allergies in people and polluting soil and water. However, we are not always aware of their danger and how to process them correctly.
First of all, the leftover of an empty cartridge is a container. As such, it must be reusable so that, once refilled with new contents (ink or toner powder), it can continue to be used for printing. In Europe there is a regulation prohibiting the use of single-use plastics. This directly affects the cartridges. But above all, it should be the common sense of each of us that prevents us from buying single-use cartridges. In addition, reused cartridges are more economical and sustainable and can be reused up to 7 times.
Many users complain about the price of new cartridges, not knowing that there are specialized stores that allow recharging them and saving up to 50%; it is also possible to buy remanufactured cartridges (the manufacturer changes the worn materials of the already used ones to sell them again), obtaining the same performance as the new ones and with a saving of up to 20% for the customers. So, reusing ink cartridges is quite simple: not only will we be showing solidarity with the environment, but we will also be saving money.
Of course, reusable cartridges also have a limited service life due to the aging of the material. Therefore, after several uses, the cartridge is no longer useful as a container and must be discarded for reuse. An easy solution at the service of the citizen are the clean points, perfectly signposted and that classify the cartridge as electronic waste; other institutions, such as schools and universities, have this service, since students make greater use of printers; in addition, there are many companies that, obliged by law, recycle their consumables independently.
The treatment of cartridges in recycling plants recovers a large amount of materials: for every 100,000 cartridges, 9,599 kilograms of aluminum, 40 tons of plastic and 1,000,000 liters of oil are reused. With this scheme, multinationals would make an economic profit from recycling and reduce pollution.
Nubeprint, with its “one million cartridges” initiative, has been actively involved in raising user awareness to reuse consumables and extend their useful life, reducing waste. Nubeprint uses its monitoring capabilities to accurately check and measure the existence of circular economy procedures and optimization of printing resources. It thus becomes an effective control and proof of your organization’s commitment to achieve a neutral impact, monitoring that the actual management of the printer fleet in terms of renewals and replacements complies with the most widely accepted sustainability criteria and/or applicable regulations. An advanced ML (Machine Learning) engine connected to a unique data collector ecosystem makes it possible to track every new or remanufactured cartridge and every printer component.
SOURCE: nationalgeographic.com.es/elespanol.com/ Nubeprint
