Archive for the ‘recycle’ Category

A greener way of living can be perceived by most folks as meaning a basic way of life where clothing and food are made and grown by people themselves. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, you don’t need to go to such measures to get started living a greener life. There are a lot of individuals these days who still take their cans and bottles and just throw them into the trash. By just taking these items and placing them into a recyclable container, you can set out to help the planet.

Naturally, it doesn’t stop at merely your soda pop and beer bottles. If you really went through your scraps, I can guarantee that you will see other items that are recyclable. In this article, we will be looking at several things that people never think about recycling.

First, let’s look at the recycling of daily newspapers. On a daily basis, newspapers are disposed of by people once they are done reading the papers. The fact that a newspaper can be recycled is frequently not even considered. The truth is that newspapers should be considered for recycling because they are made from paper. Imagine how many trees would be saved on an annual basis as a result of more people deciding to recycle their old newspapers. Newspapers are merely a starting point here. Recycling paper of any form should be considered rather than merely discarding it. Cardboard boxes can likewise be kept separate although in many cases this is not being done.

Additionally, food containers are something that a lot of people need to consider recycling. Recycling mayonnaise bottles and other types plastic bottles along with many different sorts of containers is possible. But many people finish the bottles or containers and simply throw them in the trash. The fact that you can manufacture other products from recycled items such as this makes economic sense as well as being eco-friendly. The air we breathe will be cleaner if the items that people have recycled can be reused rather than having to increase production to replace these.

One more thing that a lot of people fail to think about recycling is their clothes. There are numerous uses for clothes. Discarded clothes for recycling are being utilized by businesses to provide insulation for homes. Since cotton is chiefly used, insulating a home this way is safe and there is the added benefit that old clothes are not being taken to a landfill site. If you’ve got an old shirt, bear this in mind before throwing it away. The likely uses for such a shirt are many.

Papers, glass and plastics are recyclable items and it is important that you keep this in mind. Put differently, you can recycle almost all of what you currently put in your normal rubbish. If more folks began recycling everything that can be recycled, we would be able to help the planetearth more than anyone can possibly imagine. Now is the time to recycle if you would like to adopts a greener lifestyle.

Nowadays all we hear about is how we should recycle everything to save our planet from danger. Do we really need to do this? Think about the fact that a single plastic shopping bag can take up to 1,000 years to totally decay. A thousand years is quite a long time for only one plastic bag. Estimate how many trash bags you use annually along with those plastic shopping bags. You’re talking about a good deal of plastic bags when you multiply that amount by the number of people living in our country. Rather than discarding it and waiting for it to decompose, we can recycle it so that it can be used again. Many other items are usually recycled, among them old tires being used in making playgrounds and plastic bags being used in clothing. Almost anything can be reused.

The town of Lemoore, California began a stringent recycling program 15 years ago. If Lemoore residents did not observe the recycling rules, they had to pay fines. Many of the people opted to comply and the town benefited immensely from recycling. They were able to construct a new playground as well as create a water park. They were able to fund other municipal requisites such as a police department and pre-school scholarships through their recycling. Thus, you can understand that recycling can produce money for other things as well as decrease the amount of trash going to the landfill.

Even though it may appear that the recycling efforts of one person can’t make a difference, multiply that small difference by everyone in the world and the results could be great. Land fill sites would be much smaller, meaning they are more low-cost to manage as well as not leaving a terrible scar on the surrounding area. Through recycling, we can take care of the earth and also help to make money for people in need. Everyone benefits.

Think about the quandary of animals even if you’re not genuinely into recycling. Issues in our environment including global warming are not merely destroying the environment but harming wildlife too. By simply spending a little time recycling, you’re saving the planet for the next generation to enjoy, just like you have.

Maybe you fail to see how long it actually takes every item you toss to decay As mentioned earlier, a plastic bag will take roughly 1,000 years to decompose. A glass jar may in reality take up to one million years to decompose and styrofoam may never decay at all while other things, such as disposable diapers and milk bottles, can take hundreds of years. Because all of these items are recyclable, why should we discard them?

Of course, currently we don’t have the technology to recycle several things but this could change soon. For now, there’s absolutely no reason we can’t recycle plastics, metals, and glass. It’s not difficult and doesn’t cost you anything so why not help towards saving our planet? If we all helped, a ton of good would be done.

If you’ve ever investigated the possibility of refilling your toner cartridges, you’ll probably have come across information warning against compatible toner quality.   In some cases they’re absolutely correct, occasionally you’ll find a company that just sells low grade toner refills just to make a quick buck.    But I can assure you that they are more the exception than the rule, after all it doesn’t make much sense as a business model.   The firms who sell printer toner refills, have in a way the same vested interest as the printer manufacturers.

Compatible Toner Quality Problems
Imagine you’ve set up your business to supply people and companies with compatible toner for them to refill their cartridges over and over. Customer will save so much money each time they do it that they’re bound to keep coming back for more. The costs will have to be significantly lower than the brand refills obviously but if the toner is of the same quality, there are no real issues.

Why try and make a few pennies by sending out inferior toner, you’ll get angry customers, no repeat business and lots of stress. The vast majority of companies in this line are very green minded and want to provide a good eco friendly service.

Take the Risk

Seriously have a look around, try and find some recommendations, ask a few questions of the supplier. The cost and environmental savings are so large it’s worth taking a risk. Even if you are really unlucky and get poor quality toner refills it won’t have cost very much. You can even put the cartridge away for when you need to do a big print run when quality is not that important.

Seriously in most situations where I have used toner refills in many, many printers the results have been indistinguishable from the brand toner refills. The average savings of about 80% make it a real boon in these days of rising prices.

I generally only use the one firm when I am buying compatible toner refills, of course if you’re in teh US it’s probably not worth using them – but use their checker tool to see if your printer can be refillled easily – you can find it here

You can then try and find a company nearer home, if anyone has any real experience of such companies outside the UK then I’d be really interested to hear about them.

It might not seem important, but if you look carefully at the Epson SX215 printer you’ll see the problems facing the printer companies. It’s not obvious at first, just seems a bargain all in one printer, gets loads of decent reviews and a fraction of the cost you’d have paid for something like this a few years ago.

Epson Stylus SX215

The reason that Epson are selling these printers at such a low price is because their business model depends on it.     In the UK its currently about £50, which is very cheap in my opinion but no great surprise.

You see Epson and all the major printer manufacturers don’t make the majority of their profits on selling printers like the Epson Stylus SX215 at that low price.   They actually make very little, in some cases I suspect virtually nothing on the hardware cost themselves.

The model requires that they make money on consumables, which when you think about it makes a lot more sense from a profit point of view.    The paper and printer costs of the average ink jet printers is much more than the costs if the printer itself.

Why is the Epson SX215 so interesting?

I’ll tell you why, simply because it perfectly illustrates the dilemma facing the printing companies.  They are locked into this business model which is crumbling around them.  You see forcing you to buy something like consumables is fraught with dangers – here’s just a few of them.

• It’s not Environmentally Friendly – this is probably of least concern to the companies, who can always spin their approach into a green looking one.  The most environmentally friendly way to keep a printer running is to produce high quality toner and ink cartridges which can be easily and cheaply refilled by the user – unfortunately although entirely possible this massively cuts back potential profits.
• How to force consumers to buy your refills (legislation) – from a legal point of view this is actually quite difficult.  Many countries have legislation which stops you doing things like saying the a guarantee is invalid  if you don’t use their refills
• Technical Enforcement – like many printers the cartridges on the Epson Stylus SX215 have little chips on them to force you to use only Epson Inks, however these are actually very easy to copy and are being copied in cheap replaceable ink cartridges

Juts  looking at these three issue you can see companies like Epson have a problem from many sides with this business model, from environmental, legal and the technical sides they are under attack.  Let’s just look at the comparative costs to better illustrate -

I’m using the amazon costs for this printer just to illustrate properly

• Printer Cost at Amazon UK  - Listed at £49.99 here
• Epson replacement Cartridge Cost – 26.74 for four here – so that’s about £6.68 each.
• But freely available and actually pushed by Amazon are these inks 10.99 for 12 here – which is about £0.91 each.

That makes the cost of the Epson cartridges 700% more expensive than buying compatible inks with a built in chip, that’s one heck of a price difference !

There will of course the usual nonsensical arguments about printer damage and print quality of course. But let’s take print quality first – lets assume the Epson ink produces slightly better prints (which is by no means guaranteed) on the Epson SX215. But most people are not that bothered about fantastic print quality for every print out, in fact it could be argued that the average buyer of a cheap multipurpose printer like this just wants a simple printer that makes decent copies – are they prepared to pay 700% more for a possible slight quality boost?

The printer companies will have to make a decision soon, the problems of sustaining this environmentally unfriendly business model are mounting. The free market is hitting this rip off model used to overcharge buyers of their printers.

I hope they see sense and start making these printers refillable – stop wasting time and resources in producing killer chips in printers and cartridges just to make more money. If they did this and supplied quality refills at a reasonable price they might actually do rather well from it, people might stop refilling with compatible toner and use theirs instead.

I wonder how much toner is being wasted in cartridges due to printer manufacturers – special toner sensors. These have all sorts of names usually pretending to be protecting your print quality or even the printer itself. In reality it’s the usual rip off, manufacturers eager to improve their bottom line by getting you to buy more cartridges for your printer. I saw an awful example in the HP CM1015 Toner cartridge refill. The printer was complaining about that the toner cartridge was empty and refusing to print. This was the usual little sensor playing up and telling me something that was empty when it clearly wasn’t.

I mean most of us are lucky to be blessed with the gift of sight, we can see when the quality is getting worse, and if we carry on printing we are happy to accept a slightly lighter shade of black. Half the stuff I print – the only required quality is being legible.

But no we have these stupid sensors, like in the CM1015 and when the sensor has decided that you’ve printed enough then it makes the cartridge unusable. It’s literally like driving your car and when the petrol warning light comes on your car stops working, in doesn’t matter there’s still more petrol in it, the sensor stops your car working.

Now I know many people who routinely get 30-40% more printouts from these cartridges by reseting the chips.

Yes that’s right – you have to reset the manufacturers chip to carry on using the toner in the CM1015 toner cartridge that you have paid for !!!

Because HP sensor technology has decided that there is no toner in your cartridge and you have to buy a new one. It really makes me mad and there is only one reason they do this to make more money out of us poor saps who have to buy replacement toner cartridges. I can’t quite express how mad this makes me !

We are supposed to be reducing our consumption and waste, yet practically every printer company going is locked into this exploitative model of conning their customers in to buying more and more consumables to boost their profits. 30-40% left in the ink you have paid for but are denied, sounds pretty terrible way to treat a customer to me.

By the way for some of the HP printers like the CM1015, make sure you disable the stupid quality check which can disable your cartridges. You’ll find them in various places hidden on the menus but often somewhere like this

System Setup>Print Quality>Replace Supplies>Override out

You set this from the control panel. What you are actually doing is telling the stupid printer that you will decide when the quality requires a new cartridge. Unfortunately all sorts of printers need different techniques, from resetting chips, covering sensors with scotch tape, even opening and leaving cover door works on some models (presumably fooling the printer into thinking you’ve given it a new cartridge.)

As an industry, the printer companies have one of the most shameful, wasteful and deceitful business models. How many printers are designed to purposely mislead the owners about when their cartridges are empty. I say take all the restrictions off and let people decide.

Make sure you get the most out of the toner you have paid for, and when it’s empty find one of the many companies who can sell you all you need to refill the cartridge, typically it will be a small kit to make hole, a bottle of replacement compatible toner and either a chip resetter or a replacement chip. You’ll save up to 80% on a new cartridge and better still save valuable environmental resources by reusing something which would work perfectly fine if it hadn’t been disabled like the HP CM1015 toner cartridge is.