Remanufactured Printer Cartridges Save Oil
Did you know that it takes 3 ounces of oil to produce an inkjet printer cartridge?
Did you know that 500 million inkjet cartridges are sold, per year, in North America alone?
If you do the math on this one, 1.5 trillion ounces of oil are used to manufacture printer cartridges. That’s 11.7 million gallons of oil. A staggering number!
Some of you may be wondering what can be done about this. The answer is . . . Use remanufactured inkjet cartridges.
Remanufactured inkjet cartridges are cartridges that were originally manufactured by your printer maker (HP, Lexmark, Dell, Canon, Epson). Once that original cartridge ran out of ink it made it in to the hands of a remanufacturer who did a whole bunch of cleaning and testing (simple description) before refilling the cartridge with ink. Once the cartridge was refilled more testing was done before the cartridge was made available to sell.
Actually, I should have prefaced the above description with “A good cartridge remanufacturer will do the following”. There are a whole bunch of remanufacturers out there who do nothing more than put ink back in the cartridge. Not good!
Okay, back to saving oil. Typically a cartridge can be remanufactured 1-2 times. Because the same cartridge is being used twice (we’ll assume just one remanufacturing per cartridge for this example) you are saving 3 ounces of oil.
If we do our math again, assuming every new cartridge is manufactured once, that 500 million becomes 250 million. Our oil consumption goes down to 5.8 million gallons. Split these numbers in half again to assume a cartridge is remanufatured twice.
If remanufactured inkjet cartridges are environmentally friendly and cost less then manufacturer brand cartridges (they really do!), why aren’t they more popular. How come everyone does not use them?
For a few simple reasons.
1) As mentioned before, not all remanufacturers are good remanufacturers. Let’s face it, it only takes one bad experience with a product to turn you off to it. Additionally you will tell a whole bunch of your friends about your experience with the remanufactured cartridge, causing them not to purchase either.
2) Remanufactured cartridges are not as good as manufacturer brand cartridges. As much as those in the industry hate to hear this, they level of quality is just not the same. It’s close, some reports say with a half of a percent. Probably more like 1% for those that do the job right. But when you are talking about millions of cartridges a half to one percent is huge number. Printer manufacturers do not make perfect cartridges either. They have an error rate and you will get defective cartridges from them.
3) Customer support by remanufactured vendors is not that good. This is not a blanket statement because there are remanufactured cartridge vendors that do a terrific job supporting their product. But again, there are those that are completely useless and they are killing those that do a good job. If we are honest about our buying habits, we are okay with a product that we might have problems with as long as we know there is someone there to take care of us when things go wrong. In a lot of cases it is the support that sells the product.
4) Printer manufacturers have deep pockets! The folks that make your printer have a lot of money to spend on advertising. Advertising that convinces you that you would be foolish to buy anything but the cartridges they make.
So, what should you do? This depends on you.
If you are environmentally conscious and want to save some money, go with a remanufactured cartridge. Remember, you are buying a product with a slightly higher defective rate so make sure you find a reliable vendor (ask them about their remanufacturing process) with verifiable positive feedback. Heck, leave a post here and I will email you some good ones.
If spending more for printer cartridges because you know you are getting a higher quality product is for you, buy a cartridge made by your printer manufacturer. These are easy to find and you don’t need to be to conscious about who you buy them from.
Let me about your experiences with either remanufactured or manufacturer brand cartridges. I’d love to hear from you.
________________________________________________________
Ads
--- Top Selling Printers ---
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm
In my experience I have owned printers which work very well with remanufactured cartridges and in some cases printers which would for whatever reason only worked with Genuine ink cartridges. In my experience Canon, Epson and Brother printers work great with remanufactured however HP and Lexmark worked better with genuine ink. For my laser printer remanufactured works fine. I have heard color may be a different story.