» How Empty Cartridges Raise Funds for Charities
You may have noticed how expensive new printer cartridges are. Some cartridges have prices where the cost per ml of ink is higher than human blood, or vintage champagne!
Because of this high cost, there is a large market for other companies to step in, and reuse the empty cartridges to produced refilled ones. Often these are called ‘compatible’, ‘recycled’ or ‘remanufactured’ cartridges, even though they are reused cartridges.
All ‘recycling’ projects you have seen that raise money for good causes make their money from collecting empties cartridges to be reused, not from recycling. It’s just that recycling is the word that consumers use to describe the process.
Actually recycling cartridges (instead of reusing them) cannot raise money for charities, as it’s a process that costs money: any small benefit from the recycling does not exceed the resources used in collecting, reclaiming and processing. This is why reuse is a better idea.
Cartridges4Charity collects cartridges for reuse, so that we can sell them to raise funds for our three charity partners, and we raise up to £6.00 for every cartridge, and more than £1.00 on average.
Unlike almost all other schemes, if there are any cartridges we can’t reuse, we’ll help you to recycle them properly with the best available recycler - mostly these are free services.
You can get simple instructions for properly disposing of any cartridges using our tool: Check Your Cartridge in 60 Seconds.