How many times can I refill a toner cartridge?

8th January

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.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

5th January

In elementary school that phrase was the shout of millions. The recycle team of the children across the country touched our hearts right away. The moment we all realized that the things we are doing, driving, cell phones, etc are actually killing our planet. This article will guide you through different ways to help teach our young leaders of tomorrow how to live a strong and better life by the importance of recycling.

The first thing we need to discuss is the word recycle and what does it mean. Recycling is defined as the processing of used materials or waste. Well that could mean a variety of things and could be taken extremely wrong without explanation. As the world becomes a more environmentally friendly place we learn about how to recycle our goods. Countries are getting rid of the landfills and dumps and replacing them with recycling plants. The bottles, and aluminum, and such get melted down ad turned back into the products we use on a daily basis. Rather than killing our environment by making more. Also less natural resources is utilized in the creation of products. Hopefully within time there will be a less demand for garbage landfills.

Another point is that recycling actually helps protect the environment. When you’re finished with your bottle, don’t just throw it away, fill it up again and reuse it. One bottle should be able to be reused hundreds of times. You wouldn’t throw a baby bottle away. Recycling also helps conserve limited resources. With the pollution being everywhere we need to make sure that we save our resources to help have more clear air. Waking up at 5 in the morning, feeling that cool air, is disgusting by noon if you live in a heavy metropolitan area. Go to the top of a mountain and take a look at the amount of smog and think about what you’re doing to help get rid of that.

Recycling helps build a strong economy, for obvious reasons, the more we recycle the more we save.
One more thing we should talk about before we conclude this article. Computers, need to be recycled as well. Computers are the way of the future and everyone has one, pretty much. The moment a brand new computer comes out on the market it is already out dated. Rather than getting rid of the computer turn these computers in. The economy is at its worst and letting others use them will help. The green aspect of computer recycling is about not filling the landfills with these huge machines.

In conclusion it is important that we understand the importance of recycling. The more we recycle the more we will protect our children and our assets. Recycling saves us all; money and it teaches our children the true value of a dollar. This article should have given you a much better insight on the benefits of turning your junk in to a remarkable treasure.

Should I Shred my Paper before recycling

30th September

It’s a difficult question this, and there are a couple of points that should be noted. It might seem a good idea , to shred all your paper before sending it off for recycling. Easier to break down, and re-manufacture into new paper you would have thought, and so did I.

Shredded Paper is not Ideal for Recycling

Shredded Paper is not Ideal for Recycling

However when you do a little bit of research into this, you’ll find that many recycling companies will not actually accept shredded paper for recycling. There are two main reasons for this as follows.

  • Average Fibre Length reduces when you shred paper, which means that any paper made from shredded paper will be much weaker
  • Shredded paper is much more difficult to handle at mills and recycling units due to maintenance problems and things like greater fire risks. They will often refuse shredded paper.

So in an ideal world we should not be shredding any of the paper that we send for recycling, however we must not forget about the very real risk of destroying our confidential information. Identity theft is a very real problem and it would be simply foolish to leave paper with our financial and personal details lying around.

I guess the only real option is to simply shred the paper that contains anything confidential, and leave the rest unshredded. Also check with whoever runs your local recycling on their position on shredded paper some will have no problems with it. There are simply so many ways to recycle and reduce our waste, remember to check out our compatible toner information as well.