Before I go into a simple economic reason for using toner refill kits, lets first examine the environmental argument.    To make a new toner cartridge, you have to use up natural resources, it’s a simple arbitrage, we swap these raw materials to give us a shiny new toner cartridge.   To make a toner cartridge for your average laser printer it requires between 1 and 2 liters of oil.  So every single time you refill your cartridge you’ll save that amount of oil being used, add to that the extra costs in aluminium and steel that are needed and you can see it can make an impact.

Approximately (and obviously this changes) 44 million laser cartridges are sold in Europe every year, and about 78% of these are used once and thrown away.   If every one refilled each cartridge only once you can see the huge saving in resources that would happen relatively easily – shouldn’t we really be doing the simple things like this ??

When I read reasons (usually from people with a vested interest) for not refilling your toner cartridges you get many reasons but the one that usually annoys me most is the damage you could cause to your printer.   A laser toner cartridge is a self contained unit that simply slots into your printer.  When you refill a toner cartridge you don’t touch any working or moving parts you simply make a hole and pour in new toner ink.

Agreed if you pour in hopeless toner then your printing will be rubbish, but would that damage your printer?   Unless you poured in something extremely bizarre I think not.  Buy decent compatible toner from a reputable supplier (and most are as they need you as long term customers) and you’ll be fine.   It’s not rocket science, it’s ink and top quality toner ink will do your printer no harm at all.

But lets take the worse case scenario, my last printer was an expensive Lexmark laser printer which cost me about $240.  The toner cartridge refills where about $400 a set, to refill the cartridges manually  cost about $100.  The economics simply don’t add up the cost of the ink is almost double the cost of the printer anyway, in fact if I blew up every other printer when refilling and bought a new one I’d still be better off.

I’m making that scenario up as of course it’s ludicrous that you could damage your printer unless you poured something pretty strange into your toner cartridge.  Think about it seriously, it’s scandalous how the printer manufacturers are forcing you to buy new or send them back toner cartridges, they could easily be refilled and the environmental impact would be enormous if the printer companies did this themselves.