I see and handle them 40 hours a week. They’re quite interesting, complex electronics in a thin metal strip tacked onto a plastic box. Their designs are unique and their shapes suggestive. I frequently wish some could make better use of them once their productive life is over.

Faith Pearson has realized my imagination. She literally saw outside the box. Here are some shots of her assemblages, courtesy of Make: Online.

And yes, I can name every cartridge in each of those constructions.

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We can also offer the XL version of these, but we need your help. We currently do not have enough empty cores to send to the supplier who refills them and re-chips them for us.

We would appreciate it if you could bring in any empty HP 920XL cartridges you may have laying around so that we can send them in for re-manufacturing. The more of them we receive and the sooner we send them in the sooner we will have them available to you.

Please, help us help you. Recycle your empty cartridges with CW San Diego and we’ll reward your efforts by providing quality cartridges for a substantial savings over the retail cost of originals.

Obviously printing a great deal of bold characters on a page will use more ink, but it is also true that the font you use may consume more ink than another font.

Matt Robinson, in collaboration with Tom Wrigglesworth, found a unique way to illustrate the amount of ink each popular font uses. Granted, they are using ink pens to conduct their experiment, but the results are equally applicable to inkjet printing.

A selection of the most commonly used typefaces were compared for how economical they are with the amount of ink which they use at the same point size. Large scale renditions of the typefaces were drawn out with ballpoint pens, allowing the remaining ink levels to display the ink efficiency of each typeface. (Source-matthewrobinson.com)

Click through for images.

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FREE eWASTE DROP OFF EVENT – SAN DIEGO
Saturday, December 19, 2009
10am-2pm
Recycle San Diego Parking Lot
8222 Ronson Road, San Diego, CA 92111

Recycle San Diego is hosting a FREE electronics recycling event which is open to the general public. Bring any amount of eWASTE to have it recycled for free.

Do you need to find a place on your desk for your new printer or wonder what to do with that 3 year old computer? Drop them off at Recycle San Diego this coming Saturday.

Please read their website carefully to see what they will and won’t accept. Also note that businesses are charged for this service, so despite the site saying that “any amount” of eWaste is accepted, too much of any one item may result in your paying for recycling.

Still, this is a far better solution than dumping your unwanted electronics in the trash.

No, not in general. We still encourage everyone to recycle, reuse, reduce and, especially at this time of year, regift.

What we do have to rethink is our offer to recycle our customer’s printers, faxes, computers and monitors for them. We wanted to provide this service as a free way to ensure your electronics were recycled properly.  We would take customer’s unwanted, unneeded and broken electronics then, when we got to around 20 devices, we would call a local agency to pick them up. We worked with agencies that used the printers to train people in repair and then supplied the working machines to low-income and military families.

Unfortunately the number of agencies involved in this effort is shrinking, and those that remain are getting more selective about what they’ll accept. For instance, the Salvation Army will only take computers less than 4 years old, the very type of machine unlikely to be offered for recycling.

We thought we’d found the perfect partner in our efforts to keep printers and computers out of the landfill in a local company called Recycle San Diego. I just posted about a weekend drive they were having for electronics. That’s where I took all our accumulated printers Saturday.

Evidently this reoccurring drive is free to households, people who have a printer or a computer they want to recycle.  When you pull in like I did with 20+ printers in the back of your truck you’re considered a business (fair enough, we are, after all) and businesses pay 20¢ a pound to recycle printers. So recycling our customer’s printers Saturday cost us $20.

Had our customers brought their own printers to Recycle San Diego on Saturday instead of bringing them to our store, they would have been able to freely recycle them.

So as much as I regret doing anything that might in any way discourage recycling, from this point on we are going to start encouraging our customers to take their electronics directly to Recycle San Diego on the weekends they hold their drives and not to bring them to us. This will ensure the electronics get recycled without costing either of us anything.

I’ll make a point to post upcoming recycling drives in advance and will have that information available in the store. We want to encourage everyone to properly dispose of their unwanted electronics, we just can’t afford to subsidize that effort every month.

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Our friends at Recycle San Diego are continuing to host e-waste recycling events.

You can keep up on all their future recycling drives by visiting their website.

We encourage you to take any electronics you no longer need or use to this event and allow them to be properly recycled.

A new player in the recycling market has an answer. Introducing YouRenew.

Everyday, thousands of people buy and sell electronics. But sooner or later, that new cell phone, mp3 player or other gadget becomes outdated. Unfortunately, there aren’t many places where you can recycle electronics easily, which results in too many electronics ending up in landfills. We’re here to change that.

We’re on a mission to make the planet a better place and provide an easy way for you to sell electronics. We’ve taken away all the hassle associated with selling or recycling your old devices: no accounts, no credit cards, no fees and no shipping costs. Electronics recycling has never been easier!

YouRenew.com is the perfect place for you to recycle or sell used cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras and graphing calculators. You can also recycle and sell laptops, video game console, external hard drive, video game or DVD. If you can’t find your device in our catalogue or we can’t pay for it, you can always ship it for free and we’ll recycle it safely. So look up your device today, go green and get green! So look up your device today and go green!

Here at YouRenew, we know that reuse is the highest form of recycling, because every item that is reused means one fewer needs to be created. That’s why we strive to prolong the life of functioning electronics that we receive by putting them back to use. If your device is beyond repair, we ensure that it’s recycled in the most environmentally conscious manner possible. No devices we touch go to a landfill and we do not export e-waste. All physical recycling takes place in the U.S.

Follow these simple steps to sell or recycle your used electronics: (1) search for your device, (2) answer a few questions that help us make you an accurate offer, (3) check out and get free shipping!

If your device is worth $0, ship it to us for free and we’ll make sure that it is 100% recycled.

I don’t see how any recycler could make it any easier for us to dispose of our unwanted electronics.

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Some of our new customers get confused about how we work, especially when it comes to exchanging cartridges. Let me see if I can clarify how it works.

When you buy a refilled or remanufactured cartridge from us, we need to replace the cartridge you’re buying in order to keep our prices as low as they are.

One way for us to replenish our stock of empty cartridges is to buy them from brokers or our customers. We generally pay $1 for empty ink cartridges and $3 for empty laser cartridges.

If you come in to buy a cartridge without an empty one to exchange, we have to add the cost of replacing that cartridge to your purchase. For example, if you’re buying an HP 56 black ink cartridge without an exchange, the cost to you is $12.99, a dollar more than it would be with an empty cartridge to exchange. If you bought an HP Laserjet 2600 cartridge for $49.99 without an empty to exchange, the actual cost before tax would be $52.99 ($49.99 + $3 core charge).

It’s really no different than when you buy a car battery. Without an old battery to exchange for the core, a core charge is added on in order to replace the battery you’re purchasing.

To encourage recycling, we also buy empty cartridges that are in good shape, are original cores and ones that we need. So if you came in to buy an HP 21 black ink cartridge and you had 3 empty cartridges with you, we would consider one to be an exchange for the one you’re buying and we’d give you an additional $2 off for the extra cartridges.

We don’t always purchase empty cartridges (in many cases we already have plenty of empty cores) but we are always willing to recycle any you have. This prevents them from winding up in our local landfill. We prefer to reuse cartridges, but if we can’t reuse we want to at least recycle.

If you ever have any questions regarding what we do or how we do it, and your questions aren’t answered on this website, please call us, send an email or drop by. We’d be happy to answer any question you may have.

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Recycle San Diego is accepting electronics for recycling over the next two weekends.

FREE eWASTE DROP OFF EVENT – SAN DIEGO
Saturday, May 2, 2009
10am-1pm
Recycle San Diego Parking Lot
8222 Ronson Road, San Diego, CA 92111

Saturday, May 9, 2009
10am-1pm
Recycle San Diego Parking Lot
8222 Ronson Road, San Diego, CA 92111

Recycle San Diego is hosting a FREE electronics recycling event which is open to the general public. Bring any amount of eWASTE to have it recycled for free.

Directions to their facility and more information can be found on their website.

Via FranchiseWire:

As a mountain of e-waste continues to steadily form throughout our nation’s landfills, Cartridge World reinforces its commitment to environmental awareness by saluting Earth Day on April 22 and joining the millions Americans across the country in creating eco-friendly choices for consumers and businesses alike.

“With Earth Day fast approaching, now is the perfect time of year to remind consumers of the ways to create a ‘green’ home and work environment,” said Steven Yeffa, President of Cartridge World Americas. “Recycling programs for cans, bottles and papers are mainstream, but few realize the additional impact they can make by reusing and refilling printer ink cartridges.”

“With our continued commitment to recycling, we look forward to the day when reusing and refilling cartridges is as common as separating waste materials in our homes,” Yeffa added, estimating that Cartridge World will keep nine million cartridges out of landfills this year.

Cartridge World recommends the following tips for an environmentally friendly home office/business:

Reuse & refill empty ink jet and toner cartridges

Use rewriteable CDs and DVDs so they can be reused again

Print double sided

Decrease margin areas to fit more copy on a page

Double-check your drafts before you print

Communicate with team members about who will bring printouts to meetings

Turn off all electrical equipment at night

In keeping with its dedication to implement green practices, Cartridge World has developed numerous programs to make recycling printer cartridges easier for consumers and businesses. In conjunction with this year’s observance of Earth Day, Cartridge World has launched a “Recycle it @ Cartridge World” campaign that encourages consumers to recycle printer cartridges and cell phones at participating stores. All collections will be sent to Clover Technologies Group, the largest collector and recycler of cartridges and cell phones, to be broken down and reused into other products.

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