Going green: How Lexmark recycles your toner cartridges

Since 1991, Lexmark has offered its customers free and easy to use methods of recycling their empty toner cartridges through the Lexmark Cartridge Collection Program (LCCP). But what happens once Lexmark receives those cartridges?

To gather more intelligence about LCCP, and to find out what the program offers our customers and how it helps the environment, we talked to Rob Burkholder, program manager of supplies sustainability for Lexmark.

Lexmark: What is the Lexmark Cartridge Collection Program?  

Burkholder: At Lexmark we are dedicated to environmentally friendly business practices and since our inception, have been encouraging customers to do their part by sending us their used toner cartridges.

The LCCP program incents customers to recycle in several ways:

1. Lexmark provides free customer return methods for toner cartridges
2. Lexmark offers various incentive programs that make it easier to do the right thing
3. Lexmark reuses or recycles the components and parts of the toner cartridges, adhering to a zero landfill and incineration policy

With the help of our customers, the number of cartridges returned per year has increased more than 25 times since 1996, with more than 20 million pounds of material saved from landfills worldwide last year alone.

Lexmark: What are some of the goals of LCCP?

Burkholder: There are two specific supplies sustainability goals related to LCCP.

The first is to increase the amount of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic in newly produced parts to 25 percent by 2018. What does this mean? After first sorting through the materials returned via LCCP to recover components that can be reused, some of the remaining plastic is then separated and shredded into flakes. The flakes are then either re-compounded into pellets or used as is. This material is referred to as PCR plastic. The PCR plastic is then combined with new plastic material during the injection molding process to create new components for our toner cartridges.

What previously could have been considered waste contributes to the production of a new product. As more PCR plastic is used, less new material is required, resulting in positive benefits for the environment.

Our second goal is to increase the reuse of cartridge material, by weight, to 50 percent by 2018. For materials returned through the program, reuse has the greatest sustainability benefit for the environment.

In the last 10 years alone, Lexmark has been able to incorporate more than 40 million pounds of material (select components recovered through the LCCP) into the new production of toner cartridges across our line of monochrome printers. These cartridges are produced on the same production lines and are subject to the same rigorous quality tests as cartridges built with all new components. Recent research and development efforts have aided this goal by focusing on the creation of even more robust, durable cartridge designs in conjunction with more energy-efficient printers. The more durable product enables a greater percentage of designated toner cartridge components to be reused after recovery through the LCCP.

Lexmark: How long does the recycling process take?

Burkholder: It could take as little as one month for the transformation from used cartridge to a cartridge ready to print again – from customer replacement to return shipment to receiving, sorting, cleaning, production, testing, distribution, customer receipt, installation and finally printing.

Lexmark: Where in the world can you recycle a Lexmark toner cartridge?

Burkholder: Our collection programs are currently available in more than 60 countries, which represent approximately 90% of our global market. You can go to lexmark.com to find out how you can specifically recycle your toner cartridge in your country.