Finnish company Tones Oy told The Recycler about its bad experiences trading empties.
The company has told The Recycler of its dealings with a cartridge broker in Europe, to which it sent empty inkjet cartridges. It was told that 30 percent of its virgin cartridges were “rejects”, but when it requested the rejects to be sent back, it was instead sent cartridges in “terrible conditions” that “could never have been sent by us [to] anyone”, with the worst ones sent back to the broker with an invoice that was not paid.
The company’s CEO, Jukka Arkkila, stated that the market in Finland receives “much more virgin empties” than companies can remanufacture, due to the fact that “we have to do the job more or less by hand as “our automation project has [been] badly delayed”. As a consequence, with empties becoming “more and more important for the industry”, Finland’s 2.5 million households’ empties “have to be picked up” by companies like Arkkila’s, and when they sell them on, they do not get much recompense.
Arkkila notes that in the 1990s, he used to collect empty virgin laser cartridges in Holland, describing it as a “hard job”, and even then, when delivering four pallets worth of empties to a broker, he “never got a cent”. The broker that rejected Arkkila’s empties and sent back different cartridges had approached him telling of their success, and Arkkila feels that this “cheating seems to be [a] common problem” for the industry.
He added: “In broker companies’ ‘terms and conditions’ [it] is often written that the broker can destroy the rejects with low cost, or they can be returned on sellers’ costs. If one orders rejects back, often they are OK [after testing] by CBR’s tester, and very often they never have been sent by the seller. One problem is, when asking for an offer by the broker, one gets a list [showing] how much they pay. If the price is good, we start to put good ones together and on the pallet.
“When the pallet is ready to be picked up, the buyer sends a new list with lower prices! Changing rules during the game! What can we do: make this very public, so that sellers [have] to watch out whom they make business with. There are a lot of swindler[s] in our recycling business!”
If you collect and sell empties to brokers, and have experienced similar issues, get in touch with us at news@therecycler.com or comment below.