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Printing may have passed its heyday, but it remains a huge and lucrative market. For proof, just look at the number of well-established tech companies still operating a printer division. After all, a printer is a gateway for selling ink cartridges on a regular basis – and that’s where the real money gets made.
When those cartridges are spent, though, they often end up in landfill. Made mostly of plastic, they can take as long as 1,000 years to break down (and most plastics never truly break down at all – they just make their way into the food chain). Ten years ago, a study indicated that as many as 375 million cartridges were discarded every day – and while that number is likely to have dipped, it will still be in the hundreds of millions.
This brings us to Green Project, a company we had the pleasure of getting to know at CES. David Woo, its North America Sales Manager, told us how Green Project goes about repurposing spent cartridges, saving millions of them from ending up in landfills every year. Interview below, edited for clarity.
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My name is David Woo and I work for a company called Green Project. We specialise in recycling original ink and toner cartridges, which helps the environment by giving a second or third life to items that would otherwise end up in landfills.
Mostly from brokers who are mainly collecting them from schools and universities. There are other collection points, notably at big-box retail stores where people drop their recycling, but mostly we’re relying on brokers.
We send them to our factory where they’re inspected and quality checked. We replace or refurbish any parts needed and refill the cartridges. We then repackage them and have them sent back to our warehouse in California, from where we sell them to mainly resell wholesale channels.
Most of the bigger names, like HP, Canon, Brother or Epson. Pretty much those.
(Laughs) They don’t like us dabbling with it (laughs). Typically, the manufacturers release periodic firmware updates – which don’t add much value to the printer, but change the software enough that the cartridges won’t get recognised. So, we then need to update our software as well so we can recode them and get recognised again.
Pretty much, yes!
We started in 2008 so we’ve been around for quite some time.
Printing is down about 3% year over year, which is tough. Fewer people are printing. But for the next ten years, we think it’s going to remain somewhat stable.
We’re probably looking at roughly three to four million a year, just on the ink side and just in the US.
