Gloucester Business Sets Green Initiative Challenge

Going green is saving a Gloucester business £57,000 a year* – and helping reduce its carbon footprint.
   
The company in question is the award-winning international bookseller, The Book Depository. They made a decision to remanufacture their laser printer cartridges through their local Cartridge World rather than throw them away.

This impressive cost saving is the result. In fact, according to the owner of Cartridge World Gloucester, Terry Jeffery, two of the Book Depository cartridges have been remanufacture so many times they've printed one million copies!

“That's quite a few more than the 10,000 pages the original cartridge manufacturer would have expected,” says Terry who believes the cartridges must be record-breakers. “I’d be surprised if there are any other cartridges around that are this hard-working. I’d love to hear from any other businesses that reckon they can top this record. In fact I'm setting a challenge to see if anyone is using a cartridge which has achieved anything like this kind of mileage.”

The Book Depository uses around 80 printer cartridges a month. By remanufacturing them, it saves around £57,000 a year. In addition it prevented 110kg of metal and plastic waste being sent to landfill.**

Terry continues: “As well as providing huge savings for our customers with no compromise on print quality, remanufacturing laser printer cartridges is environmentally friendly as only 60 per cent of the CO2 that would be needed to manufacture a brand new one is used.” In fact, over its lifetime so far, remanufacturing this printer cartridge has saved 260kg CO2 from being emitted.***

Stuart Felton, director of The Book Depository, said: “We’ve had a fantastic service from Cartridge World. High quality printing has been vital when we’ve been labeling up thousands of books to send out each day over the festive period. I'd recommend other local businesses look into this as it saves money and makes sense from an environmental point too.”

The Book Depository, which was one of Cartridge World Gloucester’s first customers when it started up six years ago, has grown from a two-man company to having over 60 employees.

* The customer pays £58.90 inc VAT to Cartridge World Gloucester, whereas the cost of an original laser cartridge from HP is £119.85 inc VAT (see hp.com ). In total, the customer would have paid £5,992.50 for new cartridges from HP, but has paid £2,945 for the remanufactured cartridge from Cartridge World Gloucester.

** Source: International Imaging Technology Council, (see consumerchoice.co.uk), October 2008 - each discarded laser cartridge adds approximately 1.1kg of metal and plastic waste to our landfills.

*** From a 2008 independent study performed by Best Foot Forward and commissioned by Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse.