Paul Edworthy (Credit: Exeter Express and Echo)
Edworthy Computing enters remanufacturing market after customers complained about ink prices.
Exeter Express and Echo reported on the company, based in Bow, with Managing Director Paul Edworthy stating that “customers kept commenting on the high price of ink and telling me they were running out of ink quickly”, and after looking into “ways of bringing down the cost of ink”, the company “ended up with a new business”.
The offshoot of Edworthy Computing, Economy Ink supplies remanufactured inkjet cartridges for Epson, Canon, Brother, HP, Dell and Lexmark printers, with the company deciding on the “more eco-friendly approach”. Edworthy added that he also found inkjet cartridges “often are not filled to capacity”, and so the company’s remanufactured cartridges are “filled to maximum capacity with high quality ink”.
Cartridges are tested before being sent out to customers, with 80 percent of the packaging made “from recycled plastic”, whilst information is “printed directly onto the cartridges, eliminating the need for a label”. Edworthy noted that the cartridges contain extra ink “so [that] they last up to three times longer than the average ink cartridge”.
He concluded: “An HP 301 ink cartridge holds five millilitres of ink and is priced at around £15 ($23/€19). If you add that up it would mean that one litre of ink would cost £3,000 ($4,765/€3,819), making it 1,800 times more expensive than a litre of petrol. Millions of ink and toner cartridges are simply thrown away every year, ending up in landfill sites. It takes thousands of years for them to decompose. Recycling is a way of preventing this from happening.”