Canon Inc. and Canon Marketing Japan, Inc. will be celebrating 20 years of practicing the recycling of toner cartridges this year.

According to the feature, the Canon Toner Cartridge Recycling Program was launched in 1990, then the first of its kind. Eight years earlier, in 1982, Canon came out with the first personal copiers that made use of replaceable all-in-one toner cartridges. In line with the company’s thrust towards “living and working for the common good,” as well as having gained awareness regarding environmental issues such as the reduction of waste and the effective use of resources, the Toner Cartridge Recycling Program was introduced.

In the twenty years since its inception, the Canon Toner Cartridge Recycling Program has expanded its reach, collecting empty cartridges in 23 countries worldwide. As of June 2009 Canon has reportedly gathered about 220,000 metric tons of used toner cartridges – tons saved from ending up in landfills!

The Canon Toner Cartridge Recycling Program is described as “a zero-landfill program in which every component of the used cartridges that the company collects is reused, recycled or recovered”. Canon manufactures its cartridges such that closed-loop recycling is possible; the product is designed with the concept of recycling in mind. Hence, reusing the components is facilitated and plastic components may be recycled to make new products with “equivalent levels of quality.”

Below are key milestones that constitute 20 years of cartridge recycling by Canon:

1990 * Start of toner cartridge return program (Japan, U.S.A., Germany)
1991 * Start of recycling at Canon Dalian Business Machines (China)
1992 * Canon wins Grand Prize at 1st Global Environmental Awards (Japan)
* Start of closed-loop recycling for plastic
1994 * No. of countries where toner cartridges collected increases to 21
1997 * Start of recycling at Canon Virginia (U.S.A.) and Canon Bretagne (France)
2001 * Start of Web-based cartridge return application procedures
2002 * Start of recycling at Canon Ecology Industry (Japan)
2003 * Collection volume of toner cartridges reaches 100,000 metric tons
* Zero-landfill recycling system realized through four global recycling bases
2005 * Start of Bellmark return program (Japan)
2006 * Canon wins 3R Award from Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry (Japan)
2007 * Canon wins 4th Eco-Products Awards Chairperson’s Award (Japan)
2008 * Collection volume of toner cartridges reaches 200,000 metric tons
* Canon wins FujiSankei Group Award at Global Environmental Awards (Japan)
2010 * 20th anniversary of Canon Toner Cartridge Recycling Program

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Of the year 2006, actually.

“Whoa!” you might say, “best printers of 2006 at the end of 2009?” — “Yes, why?” we’d reply, “they are still as good as back then, yet they are now a time-proven choice for those on the look for a printing device.”

That having been said, let’s get down to our today’s participants.

The Black-and-Whites

In the Black and White Printer category the HP LaserJet 5200 was picked as a winner by voters at SmallBusinessComputing.com. This machine prints 35 pages per minute, support standard double-sided and wide-format printing, as well as the Instant-On technology, which lets the first page out in 10 seconds after you pressed the power button.

The printer uses the HP Q7615A cartridge with 12,000 pages yield that may easily cover the recommended monthly print volume of 2,500 to 10,000 pages.

The runner-up is the Samsung’s ML-2571N. This printer comes with a 400MHz processor and not expandable 32MB of RAM, which allows for 24 ppm printing speed. It has USB, Ethernet, and an IEEE 1284 parallel connector, so even old computers can connect to it.

The ML-2571N ships with a so-called starter toner cartridge, which prints only 1,000 pages. The standard Samsung ML2010D3 toner cartridge yield 3,000 pages. That’s really a standard resource for the printer of this level.

The Colors

The Best Color Printer category is presented by HP Color LaserJet 2605dn being the winner and Xerox “The Runner-up” Phaser 6120.

Why the Color LaserJet 2605dn? a) It’s a professional, network-ready color printer b) with top speed of 12ppm for black and white and 10ppm for color c) with 64 MB of built-in expandable to 320 MB memory, d) hi-speed USB port and built-in Ethernet print server, e) etc.

Each of the HP Color LaserJet 2605dn toner cartridges (cyan, yellow, magenta and black) is designed to last for around 2,000 pages and the black cartridge good for 2,500.

Our vice-winner, the Xerox Phaser 6120, also has features to bolster:

• Printing speed of up to 5 ppm in color and up to 20 ppm in monochrome
• 2,400 dpi enhanced resolution
• Standard network connectivity
• 128 MB memory as standard

There are two sets of color toner cartridges for the Phaser 6120. Color cartridges of standard yield set last for up 1,500 pages, while their higher yield sibling contain 3 times more toner for 4,500 pages. The black cartridge comes with singles yield type of 4,500 pages per cartridge.

The Multi-functions

Finally, the ones that do it all – print, scan and copy – the Multi-functions. This comes as no surprise the HP is the winner again with its Officejet 4315 All-in-One.

The HP’s jack-of-all-trades is cheap, compact, stylish and does color printing – what else is needed for a small or home office? However, it still has one drawback – the scanner is sheet-fed, not flat bed, so you can’t scan books with it. The print and copy speed is 20 pages per minute for black only and up to 14 ppm in color. According to HP, the 4315 can easily handle up to 1,500 pages a month.

The HP Officejet 4315 supplies account for a pair of black inkjet cartridges of smaller and larger yield (150 and 220 pages respectevely) and single color cartridge that lasts for 140 standard pages.

A Xerox machine holding the second prize has also become a common sight. This time it’s Xerox WorkCentre 4118. The runner-up is different from the winner in many ways. It’s a laser, and it’s monochrome, which, by the ways, generally suggests lower cost per page. It features a flatbed scanner, which does enable you to scan books and magazines. The Xerox also has a larger paper feed tray to hold 550 pages (compared to 100 sheets of the HP printer).

As any laser printing device, the WorkCentre 4118 consumes toner cartridges to makes prints. The only piece of supply required is Xerox 006R01278 toner cartridge, and you can print as many as 8,000 impressions with it.

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Do you know that toner powder used in toner cartridges is made of oil and the actual volume required to produce 1 pound of toner is 2 liters? Now you do. Currently America consumes over 100 million cartridges per year. That equates to 100 million pounds or 50,000 tons of oil.

In an effort to reduce this tremendous amount of nature’s raw materials, PRC Technologies, a division of Print Recovery Concepts Inc., announced a real environmental breakthrough. PRC has developed a way to make toner powder out of soybeans.

PRC reports the new cartridges will carry SoyPrint brand label and be available for the most popular laser printers at prices comparable to brand name versions. Soy ink has been available for some time, but this is the first soy toner cartridge for laser printers.

According to PRC, the company has been extensively testing new toner for months for the print quality and number of pages per cartridge to match brand name versions. The company says soy toner is absolutely harmless to the printers.

More information is available on http://www.soyprint.net/.

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Products seem to be delivered to the consumer in ever more packaging these days. And the consumer is forced to pay for it in the end — not just environmentally but financially as well. Tax dollars go to pay to reuse or recycle excess packaging — or to truck it to a landfill site.

In European Union countries an appropriate law came into force which makes overpackaging illegal. As part of the Europe-wide rules on packaging, packaging must now be manufactured so that “its volume and weight is limited to the minimum adequate amount to maintain the necessary level of safety, hygiene and acceptance of the packed product for the consumer.”

In Germany, for example, you can see a distinct difference in the way products are packaged. The same products you can buy in the United States are available there with less packaging, less-toxic or non-toxic components and more recyclability because manufacturers must comply with federal laws that require them to design their products for the environment, not the dump.

Historically, the United States hasn’t been big on that kind of federal legislation. This is the land where the consumer is king or queen, so it’s up to us to make this kind of change happen.

One-third of American garbage is packaging materials, according to the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington.

And there’s not necessarily a good reason for it. Many companies are simply following convention and haven’t looked into better ways to package their products.

Not only is minimal packaging better for the environment, it also costs less to produce. Companies can save a lot of money when they reduce packaging.

Printer cartridges add to the problem of overpackaging, too. This picture speaks for itself:

The small grey object you can see in the middle of the picture is an ink cartridge, most of the rest of the stuff you see is waste. The cartridge comes in a small sealed plastic pouch, which is in a box with various papers. This is then packaged in an entirely unnecessary plastic container which is virtually impossible to open.

This is one thing.

Another thing is that when you buy ink and toner cartridges online, seller often add styrofoam packing peanuts or other filler to prevent possible damage of cartridge in parcel. Taking into account that a toner cartridge box usually already contains protective filler (for instance, HP toner cartridge is surrounded by an air-filled safety “jacket” in box), it even increases overpackaging and, eventually, lanfill.

More important is that these styrofoam packing peanuts cost you additional money.

However there are some advices to reduce packaging waste, be more ecologically consious and also save some movey:

• Avoid snacks and other foods wrapped in individual serving sizes. Instead, buy bigger bags of the snacks and put smaller servings in paper bags.
• Buy personal hygiene and home-cleaning products in bulk when possible.
• Buy cereal in bags instead of boxes, which usually contain bags inside.
• Buy loose fruits and vegetables instead of those packaged in Styrofoam trays and shrink-wrap. Fix your own fresh-fruit cups instead of buying cut-up fruit in plastic containers.
• Avoid buying products packaged in blister packs (molded plastic attached to cardboard.) Although sometimes blister packs serve a hygienic purpose (making sure cosmetics or medicines aren’t tampered with, for instance), they are often unnecessary.
• Use fewer individual serving-size bottles of water and juices.
• Buy ink and toner cartridge at Toner Cartridge Depot.

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