Company Goes Green with HP Ink Recycling Program
Too few consumers are aware of the disastrous ecological and humanitarian effects of e-waste. Each time you toss out an ink cartridge from your printer, junk a dead radio or discard an outmoded mp3 player in favor of the latest one, these objects dont just go to the landfill to happily decompose with the rest of your trash. Because they are so incredibly toxic to the environment, they end up getting sent to poor, underdeveloped countries to sit in landfills their instead; in fact, Nigeria is a sort of world-capital for e-waste, and it takes its toll on the environment and on the millions of Nigerians that are forced to deal with it. Thats why the hp ink recycling program is so important to take part in. If everyone just recycled their used ink cartridges, millions of tons of e-waste could be saved.
HP started the program in the early 2000s. Recycling electronics can be intimidating or just downright inconvenient for the average consumer, since it often involves having to drive to a special depot to drop off your items; this alone is a disincentive to most people, who will end up just tossing the offending items into the trash instead and forgetting about them.
Hewlett Packard got wise to that problem, though, and made it virtually impossible for you to use inconvenience as an excuse again, by including a self-addressed, stamped envelope in each box of cartridges. As soon as your old cartridge is empty, just put it in the envelope and leave the envelope in your outgoing mail: easy as pie!
HP has earned oodles of accolades for this successful program. In fact, in 2007, the company celebrated the accomplishment of recycling over one billion pounds of product, and hopes to have recycled another billion pounds by the end of 2010. Feats like this have garnered HP titles like green giant from Fortune Magazine.