A study has found that Swiss consumers throw away the least cartridges.
PBS-Business reported on the study by Printerumfrage, document management firm Life and Brother, which found that German consumers purchased 17.5 million toner cartridges in 2013 – almost a third of all of those sold in Europe – but that 50 percent of those surveyed said they threw away the empty cartridges “in the trash”.
GfK’s study of the sales of cartridges in Europe saw that 20 million toner cartridges were sold in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with the aforementioned 17.5 million purchased in Germany alone, and Printerumfrage’s report summarised that “every second cartridge ends up in the garbage” in the German, Austrian and Swiss region.
The question asked – “what do you usually do with empty ink or toner cartridges?” – was answered by 4,678 consumers, with the 50 percent of German consumers answering that they threw empty cartridges away. In comparison, 48 percent of Austrians threw away empties after use, whilst only 33 percent of Swiss consumers surveyed said they had thrown cartridges in the bin.
PBS-Business noted that “companies are basically environmentally friendly” in the region, but that “here there is still potential” for more cartridge recycling to take place. Brother’s internal statistics supported the results, with a Brother factory in Slovakia collecting and recycling empty toner cartridges seeing 700,000 of three million toner cartridges returned to Slovakia that it sells in Germany, Austria and Switzerland each year.
An interesting addition is that another 700,000 of these cartridges make their way to remanufacturers and refillers, with PBS-Business noting that evidently the “remaining” 1.5 million empty cartridges “therefore probably [go] in the trash”. Increasing this to the 20 million toners sold in all three nations, it means that around 10 million cartridges are thrown away, which the site calculates is around 5,000 tonnes of raw materials “end[ing] up unnecessarily in the trash”.
This is happening despite “many manufacturers offer[ing] return systems with which one can send empty cartridges” back to for free, and the site notes that some third-party companies will even pay for empties. Whilst disposing of them as waste is “no environmental problem, mainly because they are made of types of plastic and metal which can be well separated in waste sorting”, PBS-Business adds that this is a “waste of valuable raw materials and energy” by consumers.