Issue #0424/1 - As Hewlett-Packard declares ambitious targets for recycling of hardware and printer supplies, we take a look at other players in the industry to see what they are claiming and how close they may be to complying with the European WEEE directive.
With Europe’s WEEE (Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment) directive due to come into force in the summer of next year, it looks as though Hewlett-Packard is ahead of the game globally – and probably ahead of many of the European member states.
Hewlett-Packard has targeted half a billion kilos for total electronic product and printing supplies waste material recycled by 2007. This represents an increase of more than 50% in just four years (average 68 million kilos per year), having started the process more than 15 years ago. However, if the growth in volume sales of inkjet printers is anything to go by, this is a target the company is well capable of achieving.
Recycling of Electronic Products and Printing Supplies
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
In 2003, Hewlett-Packard retrieved and recycled 45 million kilos, taking the total to the end of the year to 226 million kilos since recycling began in 1987. Hewlett-Packard is careful to clarify that these figures are for materials that are actually recycled and do not include any products that are refurbished for resale, re-used or donated to charity after recovery from the initial customer.
Recycling costs money and one of the concerns over the past couple of years has been that original hardware prices would rise to compensate for the cost of future recycling of the product as the WEEE directive comes into force.
Hewlett-Packard, with its ‘Invent’ hat on has, of course, come up with a way of turning the requirement to its commercial benefit. In Germany the company has entered into an agreement with a major retailer to offer vouchers for a discount off new Hewlett-Packard equipment for old IT products returned to the store on a particular day. This has the greatest benefit where printers are the object of the customers’ purchasing requirements because of the after-sales revenue to be gained. However, there is also benefit on other IT equipment because of customer loyalty and single supplier implications.
Ever innovative Dell, key competitor for Hewlett-Packard, also operates a similar policy in the US where the company will collect any old equipment free of charge from the customer on purchase of a new PC or printer. This is claimed by Dell to be a first in the home IT market.
While “HP intends to reach this global recycling goal by expanding the programme to more customers and creating new, convenient ways for consumers to return and recycle used or unwanted electronic equipment in a convenient and environmentally responsible manner”, Dell declares that it is “committed to making computer recycling easy and affordable for customers”.
One of the key incentives that all manufacturers should be using to make return of cartridges (in particular) ‘easy and convenient’, is the provision of postage paid labels or envelopes within the new printer supplies package.
Several manufacturers do operate schemes of this nature, including: Dell; Hewlett-Packard; Xerox; and Oki, while other manufacturers have collection arrangements but not necessarily using postage paid facilities. These include: Canon; Brother; Epson; Kyocera Mita; and Lexmark. Conditions and availability of the collection facilities are variable according to geography and product type.
If manufacturers do not follow this course of action, customers will dispose of the cartridges in the most ‘easy and convenient’ manner available to them. This may be the waste paper basket if their organisation does not have a policy forbidding this but the alternative is that customers are provided with ‘easy and convenient’ access to third party or charity collection boxes.
Third party collection agencies are very proactive in their search for supplies of used cartridges simply because there is a large global spot market for these materials.
In this instance, while cartridges are then dealt with in an environmentally friendly manner, they are reused, remanufactured or refilled by the third party industry and returned to the market – a solution that detracts from the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) supplies business. OEMs claim not to be overly concerned by the legitimate third party industry but, nevertheless, the greater the percentage of used cartridges the OEMs can collect, the fewer are available to the third party industry. It is therefore, clearly in the OEMs’ best interests to recover as high a percentage as possible.
In addition to the third party supplies industry, there is also a third party hardware remanufacturing industry. Hardware is collected entirely independently of the OEMs, and handled in one of several ways. Some is merely recycled as material or shredded, some is used as spare parts in the IT maintenance industry and some is refurbished and sold into third world countries.
As mentioned, for manufacturers, there is the coming responsibility (under WEEE in Europe) for disposal of used hardware. It is partly for this reason that companies are designing their products so that they can be easily and cheaply recycled or remanufactured at end of life. Materials are sourced that are either biodegradable, clean to burn as fuel or easily recycled into other products. Although WEEE is a specifically European initiative, it does have global repercussions in moving manufacturers towards a sustainable ‘design for remanufacturing’ approach.
From the environmentally aware user’s perspective, there are several choices that may be made to maximise environmental responsibility.
Firstly, for many laser and inkjet printers, both mono and colour, there are at least two choices of toner cartridge that can be purchased – standard capacity or high capacity. In some cases there is also an ‘occasional use’ (i.e. low cost, low capacity) cartridge. There are two clear reasons for always purchasing the highest capacity cartridge available:
- one, it always produces the lowest Cost Per Page
- two, it means fewer cartridges are used, meaning …
- less waste material and packaging over the life of the printer
- fewer purchase orders, carriage and administration
- fewer human interventions with the printer, and therefore less time spent changing supplies
Secondly, Xerox sells a colour page printer that uses solid ink sticks (similar to children’s wax crayons) that are non-toxic and are claimed to reduce waste material to 2.2% (by weight) of the waste from using a ‘typical’ colour laser printer over a print life of 100,000 pages. Engine speed is as high as 24ppm, though it should be noted that this is the equivalent of a liquid inkjet printer’s quoted draft print speed. Xerox ships the printer in an enhanced print mode as default, delivering 12ppm.
Thirdly, the EcoSYS technology from Kyocera Mita (long life drum lasting between 100,000 and 500,000 pages, depending on the level of machine) means that only toner is purchased as a consumable item. This system reduces Cost Per Page and waste material. The fact that the printers require maintenance kits at these page intervals is irrelevant because most high(er)-level printers also require maintenance kits at (typically) 200,000 to 300,000 page intervals.
Mention was made earlier about the variability of return/collection facilities from the printer manufacturers. So, let’s consider some of the collection and recycling activities and the successes that are being achieved by other manufacturers.
Brother
Operates a Green Procurement policy and claims to have achieved zero landfill in its operations. Printer supplies (including toner cassettes, OPC drums and label cassettes) are collected in Europe. More than 70% of the material collected is recycled and the rest is used as fuel or incinerated.
Collection rates are very low, only 3%, but Brother is actively seeking to meet WEEE directive requirements.
No cartridge collection is in operation in the US at present but a program is under development.
Canon
Canon has one of the most sophisticated collection and recycling activities, with no less than five plants involved in recycling and remanufacturing, including a fully automated cartridge recycling plant opened in 2002.In total Canon has collected over 44,000 tons of waste materials since 1990, of which 32, 500 tons (74%) has been reused. Figures for 2002 were 7,300 tons collected and almost 6,900 tons (95%) reused.
Remanufacturing of copier machines is undertaken in the US, Germany and China, while toner recycling occurs in the US, France and China and inkjet cartridges are recycled in China. Canon remanufactures used GP405 copiers, updating them with current communications modules and adding new casings. They are resold with the same guarantee as a newly manufactured machine.
Dell
Dell claims that it has achieved a return rate of 96% (amounting to 7,475 cartridges) on its toner cartridges in the short time since its own brand was launched in March of 2003. This is an extraordinarily high percentage for which there appear to be two main reasons.Firstly, laser products from Dell have, to date, been manufactured by Lexmark which means that Dell is able to leverage the Lexmark Prebate, or ‘Use and Return’, scheme on its cartridges. Dell indicates that customers are showing a high preference for the highest capacity ‘Use and Return’ cartridges – which is an encouraging sign that customers recognise that high yield provides the lowest Cost of Printing.
PC and printer customers in the US are able to request collection of old equipment but there are no collection schemes for hardware or cartridges in Europe, Middle East and Africa yet.
Secondly, Dell’s collection of print cartridges is unashamedly to ‘take them out of the market’. In the US, they are shipped with return envelopes.
In 2003, 75,000 tons was recycled, 89% of which was effectively diversion from landfill.
Epson
Inkjet and laser cartridges are collected in Japan, albeit with a very low return rates of around 7.5% on inkjet cartridges but enjoying 57% return rates on laser cartridges.Pilot schemes are in place in Australia and Europe for return and recycling of household and electrical goods and Epson in the US already recovers IT hardware.
Kyocera Mita
Kyocera Mita places great emphasis on the fact that its EcoSYS long-life drum technology is the most environmentally friendly laser printer solution because there is no frequent replacement of the OPC drum and the only replenishment is toner, contained in a simple plastic box.Because toner boxes have no technology or high value items contained within them, there is no commercial value to collecting them and therefore the company does not have collection activities in most countries. Kyocera Mita did have plans in the UK to turn empty boxes into plastic rulers as a marketing initiative but this was never implemented.
However, because of the high emphasis on environmental issues in Germany, and the fact that there is no market for recycled plastics, Kyocera Mita in Germany collects toner boxes from where they are used as fuel for energy production and within the heavy metal industry. Collection is free of charge to the customer, but collection rates are still low – in the order of 30-35%.
In addition to the toner boxes being produced from clean plastics that can be safely burned as fuel, they are also biodegradable, meaning that they can be safely disposed of by conventional means.
Kyocera Mita in the UK takes a responsible view of electronics hardware recycling. The company works with a partner to collect and recycle hardware of any type and brand. In Germany there are plans to follow suit in full compliance with the WEEE directive in a year’s time.
Lexmark
Over the years there has been uproar in the printer industry because of Lexmark’s innovative Prebate system for cartridge sales. Essentially this allows the customer to buy toner cartridges at a price considerably below the normal price for the cartridges (typically 20%) on the understanding that the empty cartridge is returned to Lexmark and only Lexmark.
Whatever the competitive issues, this approach is environmentally responsible in that it obliges customers to make the return rather than take the easy disposal route – as long as Lexmark then processes the returned cartridges in a responsible manner – but also has the commercial advantage to Lexmark that it helps to keep the used cartridges off the third party circuit.
Lexmark has been collecting empty cartridges since 1992, with two million being collected at the corporate HQ ten years later, in 2002. These 2 million cartridges yielded one million kilos of scrap metal and 341 tons of plastic.
Claiming to be the world’s largest remanufacturer of laser printer cartridges, and with high return rates on laser cartridges said to be in excess of 80%, the Prebate scheme has obviously been key to the company’s success. It is claimed that return rates increased seven-fold over a 6-year period. Of these empty cartridges, about half go for remanufacturing while the remainder are recycled.
Inkjet cartridges are collected in Europe using a free returns envelope that is included within the packaging for all new high capacity cartridges.
In addition to extensive laser cartridge collection, Lexmark also has facilities to collect and handle hardware in a few of the smaller European countries and in the US.
Oki
Oki operates a scheme for free return of toner and OPC drum cartridges. In 2002, the company collected 35,000 drums and 163,000 toner cartridges.Xerox
Since 2001, all of Xerox’s products have been designed for 100% remanufacture or recycling. In 2002, 65 million kilos of hardware was recycled.Printer supplies are collected using pre-paid labels, resulting in the recycling of 3.5 million cartridges in 2002 – representing 8.2 million kilos in weight, 74% of which was the cartridge.
Since 1998, 3.6 million kilos of toner has been collected, just under one million of which was collected in 2002. Xerox is investigating the potential for remanufacturing colour toner.
Because of its activities in the large copier market, Xerox also has toner bottles in its supplies line-up. The company used to collect these bottles – 190,000 units in 2002 – but is now moving towards local disposal or recycling rather than carrying the cost of collection.
One of Xerox’s arguments for its solid ink technology is that it reduces waste to a very high degree. Firstly, there is no cartridge around the ink. Any wasted ink (and there is a small amount of wastage from cleaning cycles) is collected in a tray but may be safely disposed of by conventional means – containing no solvents or hazardous chemicals. The ink is formulated not to be harmful to the environment.
But, secondly, the ink is packaged in a thin plastic tray with a paper lid (rather like a yoghurt pot), contained in a multi-pack cardboard box. This amount of packaging is minimal. Xerox claims that total waste from solid ink represents only 2.2% (by weight) of the waste material from a ‘typical’ colour laser printer over a 100,000-page period of use.
Furthermore, the cardboard element (which is the major part of the packaging) is fully biodegradable.
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