Times are tight and getting tighter for most people in the USA. One great way to help stimulate the US economy is to buy remanufactured cartridges that are remanufactured in the USA. Most new toner cartridges from HP, Canon, Lexmark and Dell are now manufactured in China. By buying remanufactured cartridges (from us of course!) you not only save money, but you employ manufacturing workers here in Atlanta, Georgia. Whether you are buying standard toner cartridges or MICR toner cartridges, you can save 30-40% by buying remanufactured.
Just because a cartridge is remanufactured that doesn’t mean it’s made in the USA either. More and more companies like Office Depot, Staples, etc are buying their “Replacement” cartridges from China. In addition to being made in another country and further exacerbating the trade deficit, our experience has shown the quality of remanufactured product from China is sub par.
There are a lot of misconceptions about remanufactured toner cartridges. One of the biggest ones is the perception that the quality is not as good as the OEM toner cartridges. In most cases, this is not true. While remanufactured toner cartridges do have a higher return/defect rate than OEM, it is still around 2%. Many businesses tried remanufactured cartridges in the 90’s and got burned. Quality has improved by leaps and bounds.
While the quality of monochrome (black) toner cartridges is very good, the quality of remanufactured color toner cartridges has yet to reach that of the OEM. There are a lot of reasons, the main reason being, matching the OEM color balance is tricky. With a black toner cartridge, it’s fairly easy to make a cartridge print as dark or darker than the OEM. But with a color toner cartridge it has to be identical to the OEM as color laser printers combine cyan, magenta, yellow and black to create your output. If any one color is off, then your printed page won’t look as it should. So when deciding to buy remanufactured color cartridges, it really depends on how exact you want your color output to match the OEM.
No matter who you buy from, the key is to buy from a good company that has great customer support, so in the unlikely event that you get a defective toner cartridge, they take care of you – like we do!
Last night, 60 Minutes had a great report on e-recycling and the environmental impact e-recycling is having. E-recycling is the recycling of electronic items such as televisions, computers, monitors, laser printers and yes toner cartridges. One statistic that blew my mind was that each day we throw out 130,000 computers just in the United States.
60 Minutes then goes on to follow the waste from an e-waste recycling event in Denver to a local e-waste recycling that recycled the materials “in-house”. As it turns out 60 Minutes tracked one container of CRT’s all the way to Hong Kong where it ended up in the village of Guiyu. Where literally acres of monitors are piled up waiting to be recycled. CRTs are loaded with nasty stuff like lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, polyvinyl chlorides, etc which are know to have numerous toxicological effects from brain damage to kidney disease and cancer. The conditions depicted were horrendous. Much of the plastic was just being burned. The water in the area is so polluted, they have to import drinking water. According to a recent study seven out ten kids have too much lead in their blood. They are using 16 century technology to recycle 20thcentury electronic goods. Not pretty!
Importing these items into Hong Kong is technically “illegal” but it’s obvious this is big business and officials across the board are looking the other way. I hate seeing this because I realize that most people are trying to do the right think by taking their e-waste to these recycling events. The problem is these countries have very cheap labor and no regard to the health of the people who are actually doing the work. A couple of years ago 60 Minutes had a similar story about where ships go once they reach the end of their useful life. They ended up in India and the conditions were probably worse and definitely more dangerous.
I think when companies manufacture a product they should also provide a method to recycle the product. This will no doubt add to the cost, but it would theoretically insure the product is recycled properly in a healthy environment. I say theoretically because in our business we’ve see evidence of toner cartridges going overseas to be “recycled” in horrific conditions as well.
I wouldn’t let this get you down on recycling. But I would ask and insist that your e-waste is recycled responsibly.
So you may be wondering what does Advantage Laser Products do with it’s toner cartridges? We recycle our toner cartridges here in Atlanta, Georgia where our workers have benefits like health insurance, 401K and work in an air conditioned environment with a great dust collection system. We do get a number of cartridges that we do not recycle. Those cartridges we sell to brokers who then sell them on the empties market. I don’t believe these cartridge make it to one of these Chinese hell holes, because these cartridges have value and will be sold to another remanufacturer that can use the cartridge. There is a third category of cartridge, the cartridge that has already been remanufactured and has no value. These cartridges we return to the original equipment manufacturer, in this case that is HP or Lexmark. Although some OEM’s may be sending their cartridges to illegal recycling facilities overseas, I hope and believe HP is a reputable company and is doing the right thing.
These days, printer manufacturers are practically giving away printers. For instance you can buy an HP P1005 laser at Costco for $49.00 (This includes a $80 instant rebate from HP). They will sell you toner cartridge for about the same price.
The days of disposable laser printers has arrived. It used to be inkjets were disposable, not laser. Color laser printers are now dipping below the $400 level as well. But before you go out and buy a laser printer, you might want to do some research into how much it will cost to print per page.
Just like when Gillette send you the latest Mach 5 razor (now with 5 blades instead of 3) – better grab your wallet, because that free razor takes $4 blades. You get the point.
The good thing about HP monochrome printers is that the printers comes with an all-in-one cartridge, meaning there is only one cartridge. Some other manufacturers will tout how inexpensive their toner cartridges are, but neglect to mention that for every 3 toner cartridges, you’ll have to buy a drum unit. Panasonic, Okidata, Brother all use this concept. So do the research and don’t get burned. The printers that use multiple cartridges are not necessarily bad and sometime can be less expensive, but unless you do the research, you won’t know. I’ve had customers call looking for a drum unit for a printer they only paid $200 for to find out the drum unit was $250 -they were not happy. All-in-one cartridges are easier to troubleshoot when you do have problems, and tend to make more sense to remanufacture.
Color laser printers are even more tricky to compare. At the bare minimum, your color printer will need 4 toner cartridges, and many of them will have a drum unit for each toner cartridge, so now you’re looking at 8 cartridges.
Here’s an average example an HP 3600n costs $399 (shopping.hp.com), a set of cartridges (4) costs $522.96. The 3600n with cartridges is less expensive than one set of toner cartridges for the unit. Crazy! and HP is actually better about this than most manufacturers. So you might think, each time my printer runs out of toner, I’ll chunk it and buy a new one. From an environmental perspective, this would be just wrong, but HP also has another trick up their sleeve – the printer comes with a “starter” cartridge. Starter cartridges typically print only half as much as the cartridges that you would buy on the street. In reading about printers from HP, they don’t mention this anywhere that I could find, but we see it all the time. Lexmark has been doing this for years, and HP only recently adopted this ploy.
Do your research before you buy. We always recommend HP printers over any other brand. We’ve found HP the most reliable and the easiest to source parts and supplies.
If you’ve purchased any of our Advantage Brand toner cartridges recently, you may have noticed the cartridge was packaged in “The Box”. The concept behind “The Box” was to create a more useful box; a box that is not covered with obnoxious graphics that can be reused for other applications. We put the company information on the bottom of the box and used took a minimalist approach for product identification. Hopefully we achieved our goal and many of you are finding other uses for “The Box”.
Recycling the corrugated cardboard is preferable to chunking the box in the landfill. But better yet is using the box for storage especially if it keeps you from purchasing a new box.
In addition to using the box to return your toner cartridges for recycling, we plan to offer additional recycling services where you can use the box to recycle batteries, tennis shoes, etc.
We would love to include a free Advantage return label with each toner cartridge like HP does, but it’s just not economically feasible. Especially with increased fuel costs, shipping costs have gone out of control. For certain cartridges that are high in demand, we will provide recycling labels to return the cartridges to Advantage. And we have a huge supply of HP recycling labels. So if you want to recycle your cartridges with HP, just let us know when you order and we’ll include an HP recycling label. Or if you don’t mind paying shipping, we are happy to recycle your cartridges for you, but you’ll have to get the cartridge here on your dime.
We’re pretty particular about the cartridges we remanufacture and for most cartridges we only use”virgin” cartridges, that is cartridges that have never been remanufactured before. We have outlets for non-virgin cartridges as well, so you can be assured any cartridges you send to us will be recycled.
One way or another, be sure to re-use “The Box”. Thanks! -Marvin
Recycling the corrugated cardboard is preferable to chunking the box in the landfill. But better yet is using the box for storage especially if it keeps you from purchasing a new box.