Cartridges 4 Planet Ark
Planet Ark encourages everyone to address the e-waste epidemic, and ease the burden on Australia's landfill by recycling their used printer cartridges. Simply drop your cartridges into a 'Cartridges 4 Planet Ark' recycling box.
Why recycle printer cartridges?
Every printer cartridge represents an investment in resources including plastics, foam, metal and inks and toners. By recycling them we can keep both valuable and potentially dangerous materials out of landfill.
Recycling also prevents carbon being released into the atmosphere. From the campaign's launch in 2003 to 2008 over 6.4 million cartridges were recycled. This represents a carbon saving of around 9,000 tonnes.
What happens to the waste?
The collected cartridges are transported to Close the Loop®, an Australian high tech recycling and resource recovery company. From here, over 50% of the laser cartridges are sent to the original equipment manufacturers for their remanufacturing or component recovery programs.
The remaining cartridges are broken down and processed to recycle their component parts into new products. This process recovers materials such as aluminium, steel, plastics, foam, toner and ink.
And all of this is achieved with a zero waste to landfill guarantee.
What Can Be Recycled?
'Cartridges 4 Planet Ark' collects and processes all brands and all types of imaging consumables used in printers, photocopiers and fax machines. This includes:
- Inkjet cartridges
- Laser cartridges
- Toner bottles
- Fuser and drum units
- Print heads
- Hoppers/containers/collectors and kits and
- Fax rolls
Where can I recycle my own cartridges?
For household and micro-businesses the easiest way to recycle your cartridges is to take them to one of our retail drop off partners. These include participating Australia Post, Officeworks, Harvey Norman, Tandy, Dick Smith Electronics and Powerhouse stores.
Click back to the front page of this site and enter your council details (or click here for your last visited Council) to find your closest drop off locations.
How do I set up a business collection?
For businesses that use more than 3 cartridges a month getting a collection box is as easy as calling the Cartridges Hotline on 1800 24 24 73 and registering. A free box will be couriered to you with instructions for setting it up. Once the box is full just call the Hotline again and a courier will come and take it, or if you have an internal mail room with regular Australia Post pick ups, you can leave it there for collection.
And all of this is free.
You can be issued with a Resource Recovery Certificate, which shows, by weight, the amount of cartridges that have been kept out of landfill.
Campaign Partners
The 'Cartridges 4 Planet Ark' program is sponsored by Lexmark, HP, Brother, Konica Minolta, Canon, Panasonic and Epson.
