To put it in a nutshell, we, the human species, throw away almost 400 million ink cartridges a year. Do the math. If you're interested, bust out a calculator and check out how many inkjet cartridges we throw away per day, per minute, and per second. The business activity on this planet follows the sunlight, and just because we're sleeping over here in the US doesn't mean they're not hustling and bustling over in the Eastern Hemisphere. That means the per second figure is a valid 'round the clock estimate that really is still climbing while we sleep. And that's not all. An average inkjet cartridge uses around three ounces of oil, and a laser toner cartridge can use almost an entire gallon of oil. Most of the ink cartridge is plastic, whether toner or inkjet, and most of the plastic is in the form of engineering grade polymers. That means that they will last for centuries, and the more resilient models will actually last a full millennium. That cuts both ways. On one hand, if we keep throwing these things away, we're going to have huge wasted pits of valuable materials that will only continue to grow. On the other hand, if we can get remanufactured ink and toner cartridges to be the standard instead of the exception, we will save millions of barrels of oil per year. And that's only counting the oil we save in the manufacturing process. Add in interstate and international shipping, and the dollar and oil costs continue to mount. With remanufactured ink and toner cartridges, we take a waste stream and an unsustainable shipping nightmare, and we turn it into a recycling loop that is locally oriented. Instead of shipping finished cartridges over state and national boundaries over distances of hundreds or thousands of miles, the product shipping and delivery is limited to dozens of miles at most. Even though there is still long-distance delivery of raw materials like ink, there is still just a fraction of the volume shipped compared to OEM finished cartridge shipping. Right now, we're preventing thousands of tons of plastic and metal from ever reaching landfills, and we're going to push that commitment through this century until we almost entirely mitigate the ink cartridge related landfill waste stream. We're also saving HUGE amounts of oil (which, on a side note, helps ease the pain at the gas pump), both directly and indirectly, and we'll continue this commitment with the same vigor as we do the waste commitment. When I say "we", I'm talking about everyone in the inkjet cartridge remanufacturing community, from distributors and refillers all the way to our clients. Let's keep this going.
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