Dear ingen,
Up stream Design, Design, Design is the answer. If there are ink cartridges
that can be recycled why are there others that can not. If the design
criteria for all new products included reuse or recycling standards for the
end of the products life there would be no, or Zero, wasted widgets.
If the cartridge isn't designed to be made out of recyclable
materials and designed to be disassembled for recycling at the end than it
shouldn't be made. Un-recyclability and wastefulness are symptoms
of bad design, poor planing, or out and out disregard for the general good due
to an overriding selfish objective. (cancerous capitalism as opposed to healthy
growth capitalism) Or maybe it's just an indication of ignorance due to
perpetual notions.
Bob Krasowski
The Florida Alliance for a Clean Environment
In a message dated 7/8/2007 12:17:04 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
ingenthron@no.address writes:
Alan,
your response is politically correct, but your answer #2 ignores
the
premise of the question, which is what can/should be done with the
portion
which is NOT economically recyclable. For ink cartridges
which are
rejected (not refurbishable) my understanding is that the
toner is bad for
the recycling process, and they would have to be
shredded and washed prior
to recycling, which might in fact be less
ecologically advantageous than
incinerating them.
One decent response I remember hearing, (I think it
was from Urban Ore
in SF via Brooke Nash), is that separating economically
non-recyclable
streams into cells in a landfill, to be dug up and recycled
later when
there is new technology or a sufficient quantity, might be
better (you
could always incinerate them later if it proved a
mistake). Another
is that for materials which abound but are not yet
commercially
recyclable, that recycling at an economic or
environmental
disadvantage is "priming the pump" and will be justified in
the long
run. In 1994 I remember a Cape Cod community showed the cost
of
recycling their first load of HDPE plastic cost them $900 per ton,
and
said it would have been better to incinerate. If there is
enough
supply, the extra expense of recycling is part of "scaling"
which
exists in any business, it's the cost of producing the very
first
widget. Arguably in either of these cases, we could store up
enough
of the un-refurbishable ink cartridges to eventually recycle them
when
demand is there. But that's also known as "speculative
accumulation"
which is (rightly) frowned on by environmental
agencies.
In any case my broader point is that I don't really think
recyclers or
environmentalists do ourselves good in the long run just
saying that
the reasons not to incinerate are "well-known". I am a
critic of
"zero waste" when it is used to justify sending a boat for the
last
aluminum can on an island... at some point the cost of recycling
the
last can will cost more environmentally than recycling it.
For
analogy, consider a hospital with a "Zero Death" policy... it
sounds good
to say that the hospital will not accept a single patient
dying, but using
the last of the hospital's resources to prolong the
life of a one-hundred
year old patient will lead to a shortage and
more deaths in the long
run. When "zero waste" means that waste is
never a preferred outcome,
that's fine. But a lot of rotten meat got
disposed of in New Orleans
when the refrigerators stood idle in the
Louisiana heat without electricity
after Hurricane Katrina. I would
hate to see limited environmental
currency used to avoid disposal or
incineration of rotten
meat.
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