How to Go Green with Renewable Toner Cartridges

Female1: Let’s get ourselves connected. Female2: Got to get yourself connected. Lindsay: I’m here at the Digitech manufacturing plant to find out how you can go green with renewable toner cartridges. Let’s go inside and check it out. I’m here with Dave Mcconachie the owner of Digitech to learn more about renewable cartridges. How are you? Dave: Good, thanks Lindsay. Lindsay: Thanks for letting us come down today. Dave: Not a problem. Lindsay: Check out the facility. So tell me a little bit more about renewable cartridges and why they’re impacting the environment, why is it so important right now? Dave: Well the biggest component of printer cartridges is plastic, okay, and plastic accounts for about 8 percent of the weight of a landfill, possible 30 percent of the volume. Lindsay: Wow. Dave: So even keeping one or two cartridges out of that landfill makes a big impact on our environment. Lindsay: And I understand that it’s not just impacting Canada’s environment, but it’s also, it has global ramifications. Dave: Absolutely, there is a lot of evidence that shows that a lot of our eWaste is simply being ship off shore to other countries which is India or China. Lindsay: That’s scary. Dave: It is scary. Lindsay: Scary. I know, and I’ve seen some of those shows that children are playing on along the landfills, and that’s a little bit scary. Dave: Absolutely. We wanna make sure that we’re not contributing to that. Lindsay: Yes, definitely not. So, tell me a little bit about the process. So small businesses or businesses of any size, coz I think you cater to all sorts of… Dave: There’s no one too small and there’s no one too large. I mean, we have clients that order cartridge a year to some of the larger law firms down town or even company like Techcom Ink Co. Lindsay: Wow. So what’s the process that you go through in order to create this renewable cartridge? Dave: Basically what we do is we pick our clients old cartridges, they’re used cartridges, we take them apart, we inspect all the pieces, we clean them all up, and we make a judgment call whether it can be reused or not. Lindsay: Okay. Dave: If it’s able to be reused, we use it in a new cartridge, so the cartridge you get from us is basically rebuilt from a combination of refurbished and new parts. Lindsay: Okay. Dave: Any parts that we can't reused, and there’s always some, we make sure are taken apart, separated and properly recycled. Lindsay: And this isn’t something that all refurbished ink cartridge place or sorry, toner cartridge or laser cartridge companies are doing, is it? Dave: No, not necessarily, there’s a, there’s a big disparity industry around firm, people who simply just put a whole in the cartridge, put a new toner and put in a plug to us who give you basically a brand new cartridge that’s been rebuilt from a combination of refurbished and new parts. Lindsay: So on the end user, so the business side of it, if someone wanted to get into ordering these cartridges or doing more about it, what’s the process for that? Do they… Dave: The easiest thing is just give us a call, we’ll come down, we’ll see what they’re using now and they will take away their empties and then we’ll start replacing them with our renewable cartridges. Lindsay: And I understand that you’re doing some other things right now that are also green friendly, like you have… Dave: Absolutely, we work very hard in our office to make sure that we’re moving things forward, okay, we got a very strong in house recycling program, we compost our organic waste. The bulk of our deliveries are done in hybrid vehicles. Lindsay: That’s exciting. Dave: It is kind of exciting. We got set of two more today, so we’re really excited about it. Lindsay: So, tell me something of the misconceptions that there are in terms of toner cartridges, because you got your toner refills, you got your renewable cartridges and then you got the ones that you can buy direct from the companies through the printer manufacturers, so, is one the better than the other or how would you… Dave: I wouldn’t say one is better, just different choices. Some of the misconceptions about we manufacture renewable cartridges are one they’ll damage your machine and two, the print qualities is not there, okay. Or and the third one, is they’ll somehow invalidate your warranty. I can tell you that, you know what, the quality is there, we’ve been doing this for 16 years, we know what we’re doing and we produced a very good product. 97 percent of our cartridges perform without a problem and we are ISO certified for product quality, okay. Lindsay: And that’s when people actually come in to the facility, they walked through your whole renewal process and verify that you, you are doing what you’re saying, and it’s up to the standards. Dave: We’re doing what we say we’re doing, and that if we follow the standards that should result in a quality product. And that we’re measuring the type of product that we do produce. Lindsay: So let’s take a look at one of these cartridges and show people what’s it all about. Dave: One of the nice things about the way we use to structure things is that everything about our product is designed to be reusable so our boxes open and close so that we can, you know, send the same box back to the client. We do used a resealable bag to put the, send them back into, I’ll send that to you. You see that, the cartridge that comes out is just like you buy from the store, okay. Except from the store, you have a box that you have to throw away, you have a bag you have to end up in the garbage. Lindsay: Right. Dave: And then once this is out ends up, most people end up throwing it in their garbage as well. And these are all parts and pieces that we can reuse. Lindsay: That’s great. Dave: It is great. Lindsay: So you guys are not just sitting there and taking the, recycling the plastic, you’re taking it from start to finish, the entire process, even to the delivery in your hybrid car. Dave: Even in the delivery in a hybrid car. Lindsay: That’s fantastic. Okay, well, thank you so much for showing us this information. Where can they find, people find out more information on the products. Dave: Best place to go is to our website, which is www.digitechlaser.com Lindsay: There you have it, that’s Dave from Digitech, if you’re looking for a green alternative for your laser cartridges, you definitely wanna check it out, I’m just gonna head over to the manufacturing table right now and see if I can get my hands dirty in the toner.