More than 500 million OEM toner and inkjet cartridges are manufactured every year. Millions will be thrown away, where they'll eventually be dumped into landfills around the country. Because of their hard plastic and metal materials, discarded cartridges can take hundreds, even thousands of years to decompose, and their unused inks and toners can leach into the surrounding soil and contaminate ground water.

Millions more will be tossed - in good faith - into recycling bins, but even these are often shipped overseas to less responsible countries. Harmful human labor practices are used to siphon unused toner from the cartridges and waste products are often burned in open ditches. Add this human misery to the pollution and energy drain caused by shipping millions of cartridges overseas, and well, it's not really a solution. If these cartridges are not diverted from our landfills, this equates to almost 1,000 tons of unnecessary pollution that can enter our waste stream every day. In addition to this potential waste, more than three quarts of oil are consumed during the manufacturing of every OEM cartridge.

This equates to more than 375,000,000 gallons of oil consumed every year to make toner and inkjet cartridges.