How To Recycle Your Cartridges

We've made recycling your printer cartridges easy with a workplace collection boxes and over 3,500 public drop-off locations around the country.

Printer cartridges are made up of a complex combination of plastics, metals, foam, ink and toner. Throwing them into landfill represents a waste of resources and contributes to the growing problem of electronic waste. These products have to be manually pulled apart before they can be separated into their component materials. Therefore, they aren't suited to the collection systems and sorting facilities used for home collections by councils.

Some of the environmental benefits of recycling your cartridges include:

  • Diverting waste from landfill.  This is especially important since cartridges are one form of electronic waste, which is one of the fastest growing forms of waste. More than 3,440 kg of cartridges are diverted from landfill every day through the program.
  • Recovering resources. By collecting cartridges and sending them for reprocessing or recycling we are able to recover materials like plastics, metals and inks that can then be used to make new products.
  • Saving water and energy. Making most products from recycled materials uses less water and energy than making them from new materials.
Drop off Locations

We've made recycling your printer cartridges easy with a workplace collection boxes and over 3,500 public drop-off locations around the country. If you don't have a collection box at your workplace or school or don't print very often you can drop them off next time you're at participating retailers.

Whats Accepted

All inkjet cartridges, toner cartridges and toner bottles can be placed in the Cartridges 4 Planet Ark box.

Accepted items includes:

  • Toner cartridges
  • Inkjet cartridges
  • Laser cartridges
  • Unused cartridges
  • Toner bottles
  • Fuser and drum units
  • Print heads
  • Containers, collectors, and kits
  • Environmental ™ pens

Returning Your Cartridges

If you would like a public collection box for your customers, residents, the general public or school community to drop-off their cartridges in you can register for a 'public site' box by calling Close The loop on 1800 24 24 73. Please specify that this a to be a box for the community not an internal workplace box. Once you have received your collection box you can download our promotional resources to inform your colleagues about the program.

At Work

If your workplace, business, community group, university, or school uses more than three (3) inkjet, toner cartridges or toner bottles in a month you may be eligible for a Cartridges 4 Planet Ark collection box.

You can call 1800 24 24 73 or complete the registration form.

Register Now

All registered Workplace Collection points can receive Resource Recovery Certificates that outline the weight of cartridges collected and returned.

These certificates can be used to report on the positive environmental impact that your workplace has achieved by participating in 'Cartridges 4 Planet Ark'.

They can also be used to motivate and encourage staff and clients to recycle even more. To request a certificate, simply email CSTeam@closetheloop.com.au

Example of a Resource Recovery Certificate

Our participating manufacturers, Brother, Canon, Epson, HP or Kyocera, cover the cost of collecting, transporting and recycling their own cartridges as well as promoting the program to workplaces like yours and to the general public.

When you put a cartridge from a supporting brand - Toshiba, Fuji Xerox Australia, Samsung, Sharp, Dell, Konica Minolta or Lexmark - into one of our boxes, that manufacturer covers the cost of recycling their cartridge. Some of these manufacturers also have their own collection programs.

But if you put a cartridge from any other manufacturer or a compatible brand in a collection box, these are not paid for but the cost is borne by Close The Loop and the program generally. You can help us make sure we can continue to provide a recycling service by reducing the number of non-participating manufacturers' cartridges in your collection boxes.

If your workplace uses lots of these cartridges you could:

Contact the manufacturer to see if they run their own collection program; or

Switch machines to one of the manufacturers who are taking responsibility for their cartridges.

This program has been established to collect and recycle cartridges from end users only. We cannot accept printer cartridge waste from commercial recyclers or brokers.

In the Community

If you would like a public collection box for your customers, residents, the general public or school community to drop-off their cartridges in you can register for a 'public site' box by calling Close The loop on 1800 24 24 73. Please specify that this a to be a box for the community not an internal workplace box. Once you have received your collection box you can download our promotional resources to inform your colleagues about the program.

What happens to cartridges

All of the cartridges put in to one of our boxes, whether in a workplace or a retail collection point, are sent back to Close the Loop ™ in Melbourne. Once there, they are hand sorted and their brand and type recorded. Many of the laser cartridges are sent back to the original equipment manufacturers for their re-manufacturing or component recovery programs.

  • The inkjet cartridges, toner bottles and drum units are processed through the patented, Australian-made Green Machine, which reduces the cartridges to smaller particles that can be more easily separated.
  • Inkjet cartridges are processed through another machine, which also uses patented world-first technology.
  • Magnets are used to remove ferrous (iron-based) metals, while eddie currents are used to remove aluminium.

This waste stream is a complex mix of potentially valuable and/or hazardous raw materials needing state of the art equipment for safe processing and handling.

The end result of this process is the recovery of 'raw' materials. These 'secondary raw materials' are further filtered, upgraded and then used instead of virgin materials in normal manufacturing to make new products. The ultimate aim is to return the raw materials back to the original equipment manufacturer for reuse in new cartridges.

All of this is achieved with zero waste going to landfill.

Products made from recycled cartridges

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Participating Manufacturers
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