It’s a perfectly good question, on this blog I urge you to investigate the few firms who can help you refill your toner cartridge with ease. Every time you do refill the cartridge you’re saving about 60-80% of the cost of a new cartridge, and there is virtually no environmental impact. But how many times can you keep refilling a laser toner cartridge.

Well it’s actually quite a difficult question, it’s a bit like asking how long your car will last or how many years before my TV needs replacing. There is no specific correct answer as it tends to vary from cartridge to cartridge but for the vast majority of cartridges two or three is easily achievable. Many people keep refilling them until the printouts start being affected.

There are a couple of main reasons why you can’t keep refilling the toner cartridges indefinitely –

OPC Drum – inside your Toner cartridge, where the image is created before being copied onto the page. This will eventually wear our, however it will often keep going for many refills – it depends on the make. There are some printers where this drum can be replaced separately though, so that no longer becomes an issue.

Toner Waste – Toner cartridges all collect their own waste, the unused ink from a printout usually gets collected in a waste section of the cartridge. Eventually this will overflow and cause marks to appear on the printed page. You can empty this manually to extend the life, in much the same way as you make a little hole to refill. In most cartridges you can make a hole in the waste compartment to empty it. Personally I never bother with this step as normally I can get two or three refills without emptying this section.

Emptying the waste compartment can make your toner go on into double figures for some printers though which would save literally hundreds of dollars. Use any reliable refill firm and ask them their advice, they’ll know the average number of refills for your particular cartridge. Just remember even refilling once is going to save you a lot of money and more than half your printing costs.

Of course it depends on what your printing and what for. I generally refill twice then the third time only put a little ink in and watch the quality. If the print out perhaps starts getting smudges or a reduction in quality tehn I’ll replace the cartridge with a new one and start again.

THe environmental battle is real, urgent and you can help. If you own a laser printer and end up throwing those empty toner cartridges away. There’s lots of ways you can do this by starting to recycle them.

Remember the mantra for our day has to “reduce, reuse and recycle”

the simple fact is that yoou can save valuable raw materials, energy and waste by simply using your lasetr toner cartridges again. In Europe there are nearly 50 million laser cartidges bought each year, 95% of these only get used once. Considering each new cartridge takes between 1 and 2 litres of oil to produce, that’s a lot of waste.

These cartridges end up in landfill areas, thousands of tons every year across the world. The materials don’t exactly decompose quickly either, the plastics are usually non-biodegradable. Every single time you reuse a cartridge you save on waste landfill.

Don’t throw these empty toner cartridges away or even send off to the many ’so-called’ environmentally friendly remanufacture schemes, designed to save the print companies eco-reputation. Remember these empty toner cartridges all used to come with a little stopper which you could use to refill with compatible toner ink, now that’s eco friendly.
However the printng companies realised they were missing out on a huge source of revenue here – so they removed them.

You can Refill those Empty Toner Cartridges!

There are many companies who can provide you with simple kits which can refill most empty toner cartridges. Many of these cartidges can be refilled 4 or 5 times with no real problems and each time you are saving up to 87% of the cost of a new laser toner cartridge.

All you need is one of the kits and some compatible toner to refill it, most cases it’s a 5 minute job, and requires no real skill. Empty toner cartridges still work they just have run out of ink so just refill them.

It’s true these cartridges are not broken, they’re not faulty, they are merely empty. If you notice a little plug or stopper on your cartridge, it means that your toner is one of the lucky few and is designed to be refilled. Just buy some replacement toner and refill the empty cartridge.

Other cartridges need you to create a refiller hole but it’s very simple with the right kit anyone can do this. You don’t need to tamper with the cartidge itself (as you have to in remanufacturing), so there’s little that can go wrong. You’re just filling it up with ink.

They won’t damage your printer, and you can refill the cartridge until you see a deterioration in the print quality and then simply buy a new one. The advantage you will have saved hundreds of dollars and reduced environmental waste significantly. Imagine if everyone did this, saving millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands less toner cartridges being produced and thrown away.

So explore our site and check out some links, please don’t throw away those empty toner cartridges, refill them and save some money.