So you’ve been buying inkjet cartridges for your printer for a few years and you want to know what you can do with all of the empties? Well you have a few options. Some practical, some perhaps not so much. In any event, here are a few popular ways to get rid of old inkjet printer ink cartridges…
Recycling/Selling
You can sell your cartridges to a service like Toner Buyer, where you might get anywhere from five, ten even twenty dollars a sale depending on what exactly you’re trading in. Look, those cartridges can get pretty pricey, so anything you can do to offset the price, you should at least consider.
Refilling
Yes, you can, in fact, refill a cartridge. In fact, many of the cartridges you use have been refitted based on brand or changes in design. Unfortunately, there are some downsides to refilling and refitting. The hardware itself can be damaged over time if you keep refilling the same cartridge, and refilling one can be so tricky, so difficult, that you may as well buy a new one half the time.
“Endless Ink”
Another option is to take an empty cartridge and hook it up to a continuous ink system. This ensures that you always have ink coming in. Ultimately, this tends to be cheaper than buying replacement cartridges, but if you don’t have the technical know how, you’re better off hiring someone to set it up for you, buying a pre-made endless ink system or just recycling your cartridge.
Building Blocks
Okay, we’re just joking with this one, but why not grab some superglue and built a fort on your desk? In all seriousness, you probably don’t want to have a stack of messy, disposed ink cartridges cluttering up your work space.
Your best bet really is to do something with the cartridges to offset the cost of buying new ones, so refilling and recycling really are a great way to safely reuse your cartridges.