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the whole comparing the cost of ink to blood is really stupid to me. Of course it is; I donate blood all of the time. If people sold blood instead of giving it away, than I am sure things could be a little more even. Really it's all about the laws of supply and demand. Economics 101, people!
i agree with your statement, however blood replenishes it's self; practically an infinite supply, and is given away voluntary.You donate blood for free or maybe even for a cookie and a small juice. But the people taking your blood sells it to someone who needs it, thus it cost someone money for blood.
Laser FTW. I picked up a couple of Brother 2140's as gifts for people when they were $50 at BestBuy. The HP #45 ink mentioned in the article is $61 shipped from NewEgg for 2 cartridges (rated 1600 pages) while the TN360 cartridge for Brother laser is $47 shipped for 1 cartridge @ 2600 pages. The bigger laser printers are an even better value. Add to that the 20+ pages/minute printing speed no matter how much the coverage is, and not worrying about the print heads drying up and it's a pretty damn good deal.
i agree with your statement, however blood replenishes it's self; practically an infinite supply, and is given away voluntary.
ink is manufactured, and people are payed to make it.
Repeat after me: Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle. These are listed in order of decreasing importance. Recycling is a failure to do the first three. Dumping a printer to get a new one (encouraged by the stupidly high ink : printer cost ratio) is a failure of all four.
Forget paper and plastic. You seem to be under the misapprehension that our dumped electronics (with their mercury, arsenic, cadmium, ...) end up in *our* dumps. Want to know why our landfills can be turned into parks? Because of places like this.
The Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode would have gone an entirely different way if they had followed their tangent that aluminum recycling is profitable and researched cell phone and PC reclamation. (They didn't even touch on composting, although that's not relevant here.)
This pdf, for example, gives a pretty good overview of the electronics lifecycle. Skip to page 6, where the most interesting facts for this discussion start:
No surprise just the other day I went to Microcenter to buy ink for my printer that is 8 years old. the only ink cartridges I could find were 3rd Party & cost $50...I know my printer is "old" but it works just fine and was one of the best at the time of it's release. I ended up buying a new one for $35...
i usually buy those $20 AR rebate printers and toss them to the garbage after i'm done and move on to a new printer.
It's not going to hurt anything. Landfills are made to be safe. They don't just take things and shove it in a hole. There's even landfills that have been turned into parks.
Anyway, some things are good to recycle, some aren't worth the extra time and money. Watch the Penn & Teller episode on recycling, it'll blow your mind.
3rd party is your friend, if you can wait for the cartridges to be shipped.
Carrot Ink
LaserMonks
I've used both of these companies for 3rd party cartridges for my Epson and Canon printers and they're both pretty good.
However, with my Canon iP6600 (which, with some tweaks, also prints on CDs/DVDs directly) that I've had for the past couple of years, I've gotten into refilling the cartridges and resetting the chips. It cost me about 30 bucks altogether for one black (three 30ml bottle of black ink) and one color (one 30ml bottle each of cyan, magenta, and yellow) ink refill kit (both came with the necessary accessories to refill) and another 30 bucks for a Canon CLI-8 chip resetter, but I figure I've already saved at least twice that already (and have plenty of ink in the refill kits left). The only downside is that I still have to purchase the Canon OEM "photo" cyan and "photo" magenta cartridges, since I still can't find 3rd party equivalents, but I don't have to change them very often (1-2 times a year, at most).