Why Should You Recycle A Printer Ink Cartridge? August 15, 2011 14:36 by Matt Bird
Think how much you print in an average year... if it's from a company perspective you might be thinking of the 10's, possibly 100's of toner cartridges per annum, an individual then maybe 3 or 4 sets of printer ink.
I was wondering along doing my job today (well, sitting down doing it) when I stumbled across an awesome stat.
HP now manufactures 3.5 products every second
That means they've created around 60 products just in the time it's taken you to read to here.
Lets take the very gentle assumption of a mere 6 hours of production a day. That's 75,600 products a day.
So they could give 7 cartridges to each and every member of the town I live in, every day, with a few left over to use as placemats etc....
How many cartridges is that per Annum
Well kind sir, annualised that's 27.5 million cartridges.
From just one manufacturer, only producing for 6 hours a day.
Bring in some shiny Canon Ink Cartridges, maybe a handful of Lexmark printer cartridges too, and you're looking at a mightily big number.
Feel like Recycling your ink cartridges yet? Well how about this...
I Bet That's Heavy....
Taking those 27.5 million cartridges from our HP plant... take an average weight of say 40 grams (yes I did just go and weigh a 'standard HP cartridge', don't judge me)... that gives you a base weight of:
1.1 Million Kgs!
Which is equal to....
1,100 Metric Tonnes a year... just for HP
My colleague has named this the Federation Hp Starship Bollywoggle. I think it works.
This is equivalent to HP manufacturing 14 Space Shuttles per year. That's a whole lot of orbiting right there!
If this doesn't inspire you to go visit our Printer Ink recycling scheme then I don't know what would... unless you really... really... like space.
These stats really highlight the importance of remanufacturing and refilling cartridges, so if you haven't already, definitely add one of those to your basket next time you're shopping, and lets delay that next HP Space Shuttle launch that little bit longer....
Oh and by the way, It took me 10 minutes to write this and find pretty pictures, that'll be another 2,100 cartridges please!
P.s. - I understand people may want their own copy of the Federation Hp Starship Bollywoggle, so just drop a comment below and I'll get you your very own copy!
