» Recycling With a Cartridge Manufacturer
Cartridges4Charity offers a service to reuse your printer cartridges to raise funds for good causes. But you may also have seen the recycling schemes of the printer cartridge manufacturers, or sent them cartridges. It might be a good idea to send your cartridges to us instead.
Most of the printer cartridge manufacturers — such as Hewlett Packard (HP), Canon, Dell, Lexmark and Samsung — offer a free recycling scheme.
They pay the costs of this — recycling is an expensive process — for a number of reasons:
- They have a legal obligation to deal with products they created in the first place.
- They hope you’ll think more of their brand for doing something green.
- They can prevent other companies from refilling and selling the empties they buy.
But there are some possible downsides.
- They don’t give money to charities for any cartridges they are sent.
- Recycling is less good than reuse, which uses even less resources, cost and energy than recycling, as no new products need to be made.
- This makes it more difficult for consumers to save money by buying refilled cartridges, as there are fewer empty cartridges in circulation.
You can make a large difference to charities and the environment by checking if we can reuse your cartridge, before you send it to your cartridge’s manufacturer.
In some cases, we can’t help and will give you useful information on how to use the manufacturer’s scheme instead. But if we can use your cartridges, our charities could raise up to £6.00 per cartridge.