4 years ago my x partner bought 2 trailer loads of crushed HP laser cartridge plastics from HP for recycling. The plastics contained a large amount of fibers, figured to be fiberglass, which lowered its recycling value to 5% used plastic to 95% new plastic.
Planet Green needs a new name. Any ideas?
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HP Wants That Inkjet Cartridge Back
Don’t throw that inkjet cartridge away….Send it back to HP
Heweltt
Packard announced on Wednesday that it’s making strides in its efforts
to be more environmentally friendly through the development of an
engineering process that allows the company to use post-consumer
recycled plastics when manufacturing new HP inkjet printer
cartridges.”As a company HP continues to look at ways to reduce our
environmental foot print and this is another way on the front end that
we’re doing to drive the environmental factors that we’re all facing
today, whether we’re a consumer or a large corporation like HP,” said
Ken Fleming, Director, North American Supplies Marketing.
HP’s
process combines recycled material from inkjet printer cartridges
returned to the company through its HP Planet Partners program and
other plastics from things like water bottles and re-engineers them to
create new ink jet cartridges. Both end-users and resellers can return
cartridges to HP in pre-stamped envelopes that the company provides
both in cartridge packaging and free on its Web site, said Scott
Canonico, Manager, Environmental Policy and Strategy, for Palo
Alto-based HP.”The cartridges come back and enter into a multi-phase
recycling process. Cartridges are dismantled, shredded and then we
separate materials and then they go through a process of refinement.
This is actually one of the key breakthroughs,” he said. “By adding a
suite of additives, also adding some volume from recycled bottle type
plastic, we were able to get a material that is consistent and performs
on specification on par with virgin plastic material.”
The
company does not refill returned cartridges, he said, because it is
unable to assure performance. “It just doesn’t deliver the quality and
reliability that HP customers expect,” Canonico said.So far HP has used
more than 9 million pounds of recycled plastics in its ink jet
cartridges, which could fill more than 200 tractor trailers. More than
5 million of that was in 2007. HP hopes to recycle 10 million pounds
worth this year, Fleming said.HP has made more than 200 million
cartridges with recycled materials, and each cartridge manufactured
contains 70 to 100 percent recycled plastics, the company said.
The
company is still working on creating ways to recycle and re-engineer
plastics in its laser jet cartridges. “We do not have outside sources
other than recycle plastics recovered from our own laser jet
cartridges. That is a processing, refining and newly molding process,”
Canonico said. “It’s really a goal across all of HP, to identify more
environmentally better materials and improve our overall footprint and
performance across all products.”For reseller Jim Fall, vice president,
strategic planning for Cannon IV, Indianapolis, Ind., recycling
programs matter.”We offer a recycling program in support of what HP’s
doing. More and more of our customers are asking about a green program
for the electronics, whether it’s for the cardboard box the toner comes
in or the empty toner cartridge itself,” Fall said.”That’s becoming of
more importance as the demand grows for the products. Now there are
more of them out there producing more empty toner cartridges. We’re
especially seeing that in the public sector — schools, universities
and government agencies seem to be driving those programs more
aggressively,” he said.
HP currently manufacturers a scanner
with recycled plastic parts, but does not use them in their printers,
he said.However, resellers may already be selling more environmentally
friendly inkjet cartridges than they realized. “The recycled plastics
go into some of the highest volume cartridges worldwide. My expectation
is that all of our resellers are probably selling recycled cartridges,”
Canonico said.
