Every 2 seconds a printer cartridge is thrown away in the United States. That’s 1,800 cartridges per minute, 108,000 per hour, almost 3 million per day!
The plastic used in a typical ink jet or toner cartridge takes 1,000 years to decompose.
Every year over 400 million cartridges, with a combined weight of 200 million pounds, are discarded into our nation’s landfills.
Recovering discarded printer cartridges for recycling would prevent more than 570,000 tons of plastics from entering the waste stream.
The U.S. consumes approximately 700 million gallons of oil a day – a fossil fuel whose supply is not endless. Recycling cartridges can help keep this number from climbing.
What happens to our trash? According to the EPA, 67 percent of it is sent to landfills, 15 percent is incinerated and less than 18% is recycled.
The average consumer purchases 2-6 printer cartridges per year.
More than 85% of used printer cartridges are simply tossed in the trash.
If every used cartridge was recovered for re manufacturing, we could conserve more than 283 million gallons of oil.