Printer Consumable Recycling

I've had a Samsung ML-1710 laser printer for a few years now. I originally bought it when I was at University to do all of my printing in my final year. Since then it's also handled all of the printing for my girlfriends final year and several other major print jobs since then.

Recently I bought a small HP ink jet printer to do colour stuff and to be honest I'm not really that impressed. The printer only cost about £40 so I wasn't really expecting much but the cartridges cost about £14-£20 each depending on if they are black or colour and they really don't last very long.

I began thinking that it would be quite nice to get rid of both of the printers and maybe get a colour laser, preferably with a network module built in so I could just connect it to my nice new shiny router and my girlfriend could print wirelessly from her laptop without my PC having to be on. I quite like the Samsung laser I've currently got so I thought I would take a quick look to see what they had to offer and that's when I came across this.

Samsung are now offering a free post service to allow you to send them you're used toner for them to recycle. I think this is great. There are currently several places around that will recycle your ink jet cartridges for you and donate money to charity at the same time, however all the places I found that did toner recycling required you to send at least 10 toner cartridges. This is fine for business's but not so great for individuals.

After looking around the net a bit more I've also found the following companies that also offer the same service for their printer consumables. HP, Epson (Epson's isn't a free post service instead it lists Epson service centres in your area that will take used cartridges), Canon, Brother, Xerox, Kyocera Mita, Konica Minolta (link at bottom of page), some of the other printer manufactures out there didn't seem to have any information listed on their web sites about recycling consumables, however that doesn't mean that they don't so if you have a printer that is by another manufacture then get in contact with them and see what they say.