Inkjetsaver.com News

Information for The Small Business Recycling Industry

HP and Lexmarks latest strategy to foil the recycler.

Lexmark and HP printing technology hasn't changed much in the last few years, however their strategy to prevent recyclers making money on their cartridges has. I am referring to their new breed of "smaller" cartridges such as the 10N16/26 series and the HP 56/57/58 cartridges. With the old style 25/23/78 type carts it was difficult to overfill the cartridge to the point it would leak in transit. The cartridge was large enough to accomodate a

certain amount of overfilling. The new smaller carts are large enough to hold only the specified amount of ink. To make matters worse the cartridges incorporate two additional problems for recyclers. 1. Each time the cartridge is recycled the sponge material will hold less ink than the previous time. 2. The printer ink monitor can be off by several cc's in all 3 colors and/or can be fairly accurate, but only one color is out and so the entire cartridge must be replaced or recycled. We recycle a lot of the 56/57/58 HP carts. Brand new from the factory a black cart will weigh 52g with 19ml of ink. The color, with 17ml of ink weighs in at 56g. We repeatedly receive HP 56 carts that weigh as much as 42g. That's only 10 ml of ink used, yet the printer measured it as being out of ink! If you simply assume the cartyridge is ready for an refill with 19ml of ink you are in for a very large mess both on the recycling bench, and in the package you send to the customer. Each time you recycle the cart, the amount of ink it will hold drops dramatically. The results derived from recycling the 10N series of Lexmark cartridges is very similar.

By now, I hope to have convinced you of the importance of using a gram scale. Ounces is not close enough. Each cartridge must be vacuumed clean using our vacuum tools, and carefully weighed - both before and after filling. We now have vacuum tools for a wide range of cartridges as well as an excellent gram scale at a great price. More at http://inkjetsaver.com/tools.html