By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer
Once there were just bottles and newspapers.
We gathered up old bottles, trucked them down to the local store in our wagons and collected the 5-cent deposit on each one. We tied newspapers in neat little packages and had dad haul them to the junk yard in the station wagon.
Back then, that was pretty much the whole story of recycling. Today, we reuse just about everything. Grass cuttings. Plastic milk jugs. Old cars. Shipping pallets. Aluminum cans. Cardboard. Drywall. Tires. Anything.
So maybe it isn’t so surprising that there are companies that even will recycle our printing cartridges — those little things in our computer printers and fax machines at home and our Laser jets and copiers at work.
"We’ll take back anything that comes out of those machines," said Mike Owens, head of Intrade, one of the new breed of recycling businesses in Hawai‘i. "If there’s any market at all for it, we’ll pay for the empties."
Owens and partner Andrew Lo gather the cartridges (either one at a time or by the truckload), collect and sort them in a Kalihi warehouse, then ship them to Asia or the U.S. Mainland, where they are reconditioned, refilled and resold back into the seemingly insatiable market we have for printing things.
Intrade pays local customers from 25 cents to $5 for an empty cartridge, depending on how rare or desired they are overseas. Twenty schools have signed up to recycle cartridges; some are earning as much as $100 per month for new books, or whatever. Other companies choose to have their payments donated to Aloha United Way, Angel Network Charities or elsewhere.
"We’ll pay you to be our customers," Owens said. "You make a little money, you support a local business and maybe you can use the money for a good cause or a good time."
Owens, who has college degrees in English, political science and business and a varied business past, is excited about the possibilities of his 2-year-old recycling company. Intrade has grown so fast it has moved to bigger spaces four times already.
You can see why: By some estimates, there are almost 7,000 such companies worldwide, each producing an average of 7,000 remanufactured cartridges every month. In America alone, we use an estimated 50 million such cartridges each month, with about half of them having been recycled at least once already.
With that much business at stake, Intrade is not alone in the field. Some large retailers buy back the cartridges themselves. Other companies here specialize in recycling several brand name cartridges. Some manufacturers include a rebate offer for cartridges returned to them.
All in all, it’s a long way from the days when we just recycled newspapers and bottles.
Mike Leidemann appears Thursdays and Saturdays.
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