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

Epson’s EC-01 inkjet printer is the flagship product in their new Environmental Vision 2050 initiative: it’s shipped in an unpainted recycled cardboard box, the manual is printed on recycled paper, and the included driver CD is stored within an envelope made of recycled paper. But what really sets this printer apart is that you don’t replace the ink: when the cartridge runs out, you replace the whole printer. Sounds great! Or is it?

A representative of Epson explained: “When you purchase a Coca-Cola, it’s not the bottle that you want, it’s the Coca-Cola! Similarly, when you buy a printer, it’s not the printer that you want but the pages that printer can produce.” So just like you can return a Coca-Cola bottle to reclaim the depost included in the price, so too will you be able to return the EC-01 to Epson to get back 50 euros. The EC-01 ships with an ink tank that is estimated to yield 8,000 sheets.

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/.

“Inkjet prints cannot be recycled for new newsprint or copying paper just as old newspapers or magazines,” claims INGEDE, International Association of the Deinking Industry.

It turns out, the recycling process doesn’t remove the ink from inkjet prints; the new paper comes out shaded. The recycling paper mills can still cope with single inkjet prints from households or offices. But what printer manufacturers plan to introduce at the “Drupa” fair, the world’s largest printing and paper exhibition, jeopardizes the paper recycling cycle: Direct mail or newspapers printed with inkjet are like a sponge full of ink – and even in small amounts of such printed products can cause the graphic paper recycling to collapse.

For a couple of years INGEDE has been trying to solve this problem together with printer manufacturers and other members of the paper chain, but futile. Quite the opposite – those printer manufacturers focused on excellent recyclable dry toners now also offer inkjet systems for high volumes.

The association believes that publishers and mailing designers need to be informed, as even a single publisher investing in this kind of equipment could severely harm paper recycling all over Europe. INGEDE plans an intensive information campaign in the forefront of the “Drupa” fair. Clearly, inkjet printed news and direct mail do not fit into the higher-grade paper recycling system. That is why possibly this kind of printed products have to be clearly visible marked as “not recyclable”.

The dry toner performs very well in the paper recycling process that originally has been developed for the removal of offset and gravure inks. A series of tests by different European research institutes on behalf of INGEDE has confirmed these findings.

For those of us who are environmentally conscious, all the above means we’d better stick to laser printers, if we want to be greener.