How Recycling Printer Cartridges Feeds the Hungry
By Denise Resendez
Here’s a food for thought for you: about a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide each year. An average American family takes home about 1,500 plastic bags a year - and about 100 billion are thrown away in the U.S. alone each year. Did you know about 12% of the 254 million tons of waste contain plastic?
So clearly, we as a community need to find a way to deal with plastic effectively. As a company whose products are made with plastic, we started an ink cartridge recycling program to support a non-profit called Food For The Poor. Stay awhile and find out if plastic ever biodegrades and how our new recycling program works to both protect our planet and feed the hungry.
Does Plastic Ever Biodegrade?
This is the scary part – we don’t know precisely how, when and even if plastic biodegrades. The plastic bags, bottles, gadgets and all the innumerable plastic objects we are surrounded with – they haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade. The elements such as wind, rain, sun and so on seem to have little impact, though plastic does fade, crack and dry out with time. The microorganisms that breakup and biodegrade organic matter evolved to do precisely this; they don’t know how to deal with plastics.
Plastics do also break up into smaller particles, but they don’t really breakdown in the way that organic matter does. Those small particles of plastic could actually lead to even bigger problems. One study found that up to 95% of birds have some sort of plastic in their stomachs; an average of about 44 pieces per bird! As the particles become powder like, even zooplankton will swallow them. So it is actually scary how plastics can invade practically anything and are present everywhere on earth.
Why Recycling is the Best Solution
It is easy to see that plastic is inimical to the environment in many ways; insidious in ways that we are only now coming to recognize. Most items, even easily biodegradable items don’t breakdown in landfills (they are currently extracting newspapers from the 1930’s in perfect condition from landfills).
So all of us have to do whatever we can to avoid having stuff end up in landfills. Recycling is the best option. Repurpose, upcycle, reduce and reuse – these are the core values that we at CompAndSave.com hold dear; which we feel could be the mantras for all of us to live by.
Our Earth-Friendly Food For The Poor Campaign
We are encouraging all our loyal customers to send us their empty ink and toner cartridges at –
CompAndSave,
Attn: Cartridge Donations
38929 Cherry St.
Newark, CA 94560
We will recycle them for you by forwarding them to the GreenHippo.com. This is an e-waste fundraising program that helps recycle cell phones, cartridges, tablets and small electronics. When e waste in sufficient quantities is shipped to the website, payment is received by PayPal for this within 10 business days.
 |
|---|
| Visit our Ink & Toner Recycling Program Page Here |
Whatever we get for your recycled ink and toner cartridges we send to FoodForThePoor.org. This is a nonprofit that feeds the hungry in poor communities the world over. Just $3.65 can feed a hungry child for up to a month! The nonprofit has various programs that help to feed the poor and, bring clean drinking water to underprivileged communities. The organization also helps to give families real homes (any gift is matched dollar for dollar).
We urge all our buyers to send us exhausted ink and toner cartridges in large numbers and be a part of our Feed the Hungry recycling program. Not only do you help keep plastic out of landfills, you also help feed the hungry! We welcome any comments you have about our program.
Read more about the sobering facts about plastic biodegradation at Ploymers are Forever