PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
The European ink cartridges market is worth around €9.4 billion, with 370 million units sold annually. Almost every person living in the EU-27 buys, uses and discards one cartridge each year on average. As for the related market, 85% of it is dominated by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) that are almost exclusively large enterprises, who often do not encourage the reuse of cartridges. The disposal of printer cartridges is regulated by the EU Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive (2012/19/EU) that provides for the creation of collection schemes where consumers can return their WEEE free of charge.
Cartridge reuse rates are however rather low, covering only around 20% of the items in circulation, while most items are still incinerated or landfilled, generating significant environmental impacts. There is a good potential for increased reuse through improved handling of cartridges entering the WEEE stream, but more efficient and scalable regeneration techniques and business models are needed. Traditional regeneration procedures involve a cleaning phase that consumes large amounts of water and chemical solvents.
OBJECTIVES
The LIFE NEW4CARTRIDGES project will provide solutions for both the upcycling of exhausted reusable cartridges and the recycling of cartridges no longer suitable for reuse.
The specific objectives are to:
- Develop, demonstrate, and adopt a semi-automatised ink cartridges regeneration process to replace the currently manual workflow, achieving a 230% increase in the service life of ink cartridges, with the same cartridge being reusable up to 10 times instead of the current 3 times limit;
- Implement a new cleaning procedure for used cartridges;
- Recycle cartridges that are not reusable through an innovative technology specifically customised for the treatment of printer consumables, to obtain high-quality secondary raw materials;
- Provide quantitative data on the environmental and cost sustainability of the new process and products through LCA and LCC analyses;
- Monitor the quality of ink cartridge regenerated by measuring the rate of returned products through customers’ acceptance test, with the goal to reach less than 4% of returns; and
- Raise society and consumers’ awareness and foster discussion at policy level about the more sustainable paradigm proposed by the project.
The project will contribute, by introducing an environmentally-friendly alternative to disposal, to achieving the objectives of the Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive (2012/19/EU), the Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC), the Roadmap for a Resource Efficient Europe and the EU Circular Economy Action Plan.
RESULTS
Expected results by the end of the project:
- Regeneration of at least 120 000 cartridges (84 000 cartridges refilled without any modification, 24 000 regenerated with the substitution of some components, and 12 000 treated for material recycling);
- Recycling of at least 360 kg of plastic and 12 kg of metals into high-quality secondary raw materials;
- Savings of around 34 633 kg of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, 776 250 kg of non-renewable natural resources, and 593 587 MJ of energy, through the upcycling of cartridges;
- Reduction in the use of water by 93% compared to the traditional cleaning process; and
- Elimination of chemical solvents and production of residues in the new cleaning process, transforming 60 kg of highly-pollutant ink residues into inert solid urban waste.
3 years after the end of the project, thanks to the progressive integration of 3 production lines, ECO STORE forecasts to reach a market capacity of about 750.000 regenerated cartridges/year.
