Are recycled cartridges environmentally sound? Every year over 78,000 tons of non-biodegradable plastics were thrown into our landfills. Every toner cartridge contains OIL and is made up of approximately four pounds of non-biodegradable parts that will pollute the environment forever.
MILNER can provide our clients with a complete assessment on carbon footprint. We will measure power output by device, paper consumption, recycling programs for equipment and toner. We also provide consulting on ways to cut back on your carbon footprint and find ways to reduce costs. In addition to looking at equipment we can look at ways of reducing paper output through innovative software solutions.
Under the Managed Print Services from MILNER we can provide you with a GREEN assessment of your office environment. We can not only help with creating a more environmentally friendly office environment but also put more GREEN in your pocket.
MILNER Environmental Solutions is committed to implementing the most advanced environmentally responsible solutions for the recycling of empty inkjet cartridges, laser toner cartridges and cell phones. Partnering with CORE offers professional recycling programs that are proactive in addressing key customer concerns:
Risk management – Our NO LANDFILL policy eliminates potential environmental risks for customers who require proper disposal for all collected cartridges.
Corporate policy – most customers have the need to align with a recycling organization focused on preventing and reducing the build-up of waste in our nation’s landfills and those across the world.
Recycling done in North America – All printer cartridges and cell phones returned to MILNER collection centers stay in North America and are recycled in North America.
Active environmental involvement – MILNER maintains an active role in the National Recycling Coalition and through its membership in the Illinois Recycling Association.
Empty inkjet cartridges, laser toner cartridges and cell phones are returned to one of MILNER’s three North American Recycling Centers for sorting and grading.
All qualified cartridges are reused within the remanufacturing process to produce inkjet and laser toner cartridges which significantly reduce the need for using additional natural resources.
Cartridges that cannot be remanufactured due to damage, defect, or having been previously remanufactured, are completely disassembled to the base components are handled as follows by the CORE Waste Recycling Facility:
Plastics – Wiper blades, scrap inkjet cartridges are provided to recyclers for melting down and forming park benches, garbage cans and other items.
Aluminum – The OPC drums are collected from each cartridge and sold to aluminum scrap recyclers.
Corrugated – All corrugated packaging is compressed into baler machines, located on-site and the tightly compressed bales are picked up by corrugated recyclers.
Steel – The metal pieces, such as screws, pins, blades and magnetic rollers are made available to scrap metal recyclers.
Polystyrene – To further support MILNER’s NO LANDFILL policy, grinding machinery has been installed in the Waste Recycling Facility to grind the hard shell polystyrene scrap cartridges into ground material that can be reused within the injection molding manufacturing process.
If you have a printer in your organization that prints 10,000 pages per month and the printer you have uses a cartridge that only yields 1,000 pages, you will use 10 cartridges per month for that printer. What if you could replace that printer with one that has a cartridge that yields 10,000 pages? What impact would that have on the environment?
- Are many different printer makes and models in use throughout the enterprise?
- Are different devices used for printing, faxing, copying and scanning?
- Are many devices outdated, i.e., more than five years old?
- Are documents typically printed on only one side of a sheet of paper?
- Do people tend to print documents and then retrieve them later?
- Do devices remain on at night and on weekends?
- Do you manage print settings individually for each device?
- Are recycling of paper, print cartridges and old equipment inconsistently managed?
- Are devices unmanaged, preventing you from tracking physical location and determining who has access?
If you answered no to these questions, congratulations. You are well on your way to a green printing and
imaging environment. If you answered yes to one or more questions, consider each a potential area to focus
your efforts. While these actions may have limited impact individually, collectively they represent a broad
opportunity to reduce the environmental impacts of printing.
