Has anyone seen a photocopier being opened and ink poured in – they all used to be refilled like this – businesses used to buy big bottles of toner ink and simply top up their cartridges. Laser printers where exactly the same – you’d buy a big bottle of ink powder and top up the cartridge when needed. All the laser toner cartridges had little screw openers so you could refill them easily from ink bought from any printer supplier.

Alas those days are gone – the printer manufacturers realized that it was much more profitable to keep reselling you a new cartridge rather than allowing you to easily refill the laser toner cartridges. Gone went the removable stoppers as they sealed the unit and many manufacturers even started adding a small chip disabling the toner cartridge when it had printed so many pages. They are in fact actively artificially reducing the life of the cartridges in order to sell more replacements.

We have all have been brought up with capitalism so we know how the markets work and the profit motives of these companies. The environmental effect of this is less apparent though.

To produce a new toner cartridge from scratch takes approximately 1-2 liters of oil – so if we you refill a toner cartridge you are instantly saving nearly 2 liters of a limited resource.

Two Liters Doesn’t sound too much ?

Well possibly it isn’t but there are approximately 44 million new laser toner cartridges used every year in Europe – the majority of these can be refilled and used again. Over 73% of these cartridges are used once only ! The environmental impact of this is huge especially as we are discarding cartridges that are easily reused – every time we refill a cartridge we save the environmental impact of producing another one and also save ourselves the cost of buying it!

So how to refill a toner cartridge ?

Well its extremely easy – it varies from cartridge to toner cartridge but generally takes no more than a few minutes and certainly doesn’t require any special skills. It’s important to get the right instructions for a specific printer as this makes it refilling the toner extremely straightforward.

Go to an expert who can sell you the exact kit for your printer and also who will answer any queries you may have about How to refill a toner cartridge.

Apart from the environmental impact – refilling your toner cartridge yourself also save a lot of money – sometimes up to 87% of the cost of a brand new cartridge. The beauty of refilling as opposed to re-manufacturing is you’re actually not physically tampering with the working parts in the cartridge – all you’re doing is pouring in new ink toner into the cartridge.