If a company is seriously trying to improve their recycling program after years of neglect, can you still call them out for the unfairness of their business model? Yes, you can.
According to HP, it will begin to use recycled plastic to create most of their line of printer ink cartridges, where 70 to 100% of each cartridge will be made from the recycled material. That is a nice start. But as we noted in this month's Wired mag and in the blog, the fact that there are 3,500 varieties of ink because of upgrade tactics and few cheap, safe ways to refill them means that this and other companies need to go beyond recycling to really be called green.
The HP recycling program has been in the works for a couple of years, and it started to make a difference last year, when HP used 5 million lbs. of recycled plastic in their cartridges. Their goal is to double that number this year, and push that forward in the following years.
It’s a good commitment, yes, but the business model of inkjet cartridges is a rip-off artist’s dream, and ends up hurting the environment, as Lucas Graves noted in the Why Things Suck issue:
Such anticompetitive behavior keeps cartridge prices sky-high;
consumers can pay $60 or more for a cartridge that costs $6 in raw materials. It also guarantees that, because fewer units get recycled, more end up in landfills.
So we’ll wait until the program has been out for a couple of years and it’s been proven to make a significant difference to the environment that we'll be able to say that HP's really gone green.
Thanks to [SFGATE]
