Our story
The Ink Bin has a fully qualified Teacher available for educational support and has environmental concerns at the core of the organisation. We provide free, personalised collection Ink Bins to our customers and find that our regular users now rely on us for their recycling needs. We place The Ink Bin in easy-to-access community areas such as supermarket entrance ways; school reception areas and local libraries. In our first year of business we have saved over 10,000 ink cartridges from landfill but we strive to vastly increase this number by the end of our second year.
Our advice
375 million ink cartridges are still sent to landfill every year
with the rise in home working and home schooling, educating users that they are easy to recycle is a top priority
by buying a branded ink cartridge rather than a cheap compatible ink cartridge, you can put your plastic back into the circular economy
it takes around 8 seconds to refill an HP or Canon inkjet cartridge but up to 1000 years for it to decompose
refilling of inkjet cartridges through The Ink Bin takes place in the UK
people generally find it easier to drop their empty ink cartridges into one of our Bins rather than return them in a freepost envelope- we have a growing culture of recycling and waste streams for recycling individual items are growing and becoming a new norm
collecting ink cartridges in bulk reduces individualised transportation
Our metrics
- We are using social media to spread the message that home use ink cartridges are easy to recycle including statistics on their breakdown and energy consumption to produce as well as their leakage into the environment. We work with individual schools, plastic free communities, libraries, supermarkets and more but are very keen to get a more national approach to our work; providing an easy drop off.
Read more: https://www.theinkbin.co.uk/
