GreenOffice KZN

THE ENVIRONMENT & YOUR EMPTY PRINTER CARTRIDGES

Today, everybody should be doing his or her bit to preserve the environment.  Many companies are doing this by recycling paper, glass and metals.  greenOFFICE gives you the opportunity to further help the environment by recycling your empty ink and laser cartridges. Cartridges are comprised mainly of natural resources (plastic is mainly an oil product) as well as the CO2 emissions needed to produce it, it then is transported half way around the World for sale. The remanufacture or reuse of that same cartridge uses no further natural resources other than the replacement of toner or ink for printing and uses no carbon emissions in its production process other than electricity.   Empty ink and laser cartridges are one of the most difficult things to dispose of.  In South Africa only 20% of empty cartridges are being recycled or reused with 80% ending up in our landfills.  Every OEM laser cartridge takes about 3 litres of petroleum oil to manufacture, and produces about 6kgs of greenhouse gas this contributes to about 1.5kg of carbon being released into our atmosphere.  With the millions of cartridges being sold in South Africa annually this is a major contribution to global warming, recycling with greenOFFICE ensures that empty cartridges are reused there by reducing their effect on our environment.

Millions of cartridges in South Africa are thrown away every year, the impact on the environment, as you can imagine, is devastating. Plastic products are not biodegradable and take hundreds of thousands of years to even begin to break down.  By recycling your ink and laser cartridges with greenOFFICE enables you to help save our environment. The empty cartridges purchased from you are either remanufactured or, should greenOFFICE not remanufacture a particular cartridge, sold to remanufacturing companies that do.  Note the word “remanufacture”.  We do not refill cartridges – we remanufacture cartridges.  The cartridge is disassembled; all individual components are checked and replaced if necessary, including the drum.  The cartridge is then reassembled.

All parts removed from a cartridge are recycled e.g. the drum and blades, which are aluminum.  A cartridge can be remanufactured many times, when we can no longer remanufacture the cartridge as a whole, the cartridge is then used for spare parts.  greenOFFICE is dedicated to recycling; we will also recycle the packaging or boxes that the cartridges come in.