Butterflies
Recycle Your Printer Cartridges
Because otherwise you wouldn’t be doing that.
As a full-on, hardcore, export-strength original Zero I don’t own a printer. I find their use of paper wasteful; I’ve complained to several manufacturers who tell me triple-sided printing is impossible. I dislike their use of electricity; everything in Zero Towers is either wind-up or plugged directly into the sun. And I frown on their use of ink; I assume they’re slaughtering octopi by the trillion. No, when I want to print my latest Butterfly I turn to my helper monkey, Sebastian, who patiently scribes my words in longhand using an ethically sourced quill. I say helper monkey, he’s actually a small, hairy child but somehow we’re both more comfortable with the lie.
Even as the world tries to go paperless, to avoid the world going treeless, people are still buying printers in their millions. According to Statista, we buy just short of 100 million printers a year. According to me more than half of them are used only once a year, to print a single boarding pass. That’s a ton of plastic, which means a ton of oil, which means a ton of carbon emissions. And then there’s the ink.
Printer consumables clog landfills, hundreds of millions of them every year made and used up and ditched in piles. Hundreds of millions of them every year gobbling up oil, spewing out carbon, and sitting around the place for the next half millennium. It’s one of those things we do that’s so clearly stupid, so blatantly wasteful it should leave no mind unboggled. Happily there’s an alternative to binning millions of printer cartridges every year: Not doing.
Printer cartridges for your home printer or toner cartridges for the one at work can be recycled, refilled and used again, then recycled, refilled and used again again. Let’s do that. We’ll stop our share of millions going to landfills, and when we send our cartridges off for recycling and refilling we’ll replace them with recycled and refilled cartridges so no more have to be produced. And if that do-goodery isn’t doing enough good for you there’s more: We can donate our used cartridges to the likes of Recycle4Charity, Cartridges4Charity or The Recycling Factory and they’ll bung a portion of their resale to whatever charities they’ve partnered with. Or we can give them directly to charity ourselves, in collection bins in our local charity shops.
We’re talking less waste, less resources, less landfill, less carbon and more cash for people needing help. `That’s a good thing done. Go do!
Recycle your printer cartridges
Save resources
Save the goddamn world
Photo credit: Silken Webs at DeviantArt
Environmentalism
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