On paper, the recycling program was touted as a bold step toward California’s green, climate-friendly future.A mountain of plastic and metal would be diverted from landfills. Greenhouse gas emissions would tumble. And one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate change goals – trimming power use in state buildings by 20 percent – would nudge closer to reality as agencies snapped up new, more efficient office printers.That is what state and Hewlett-Packard officials said last year when they joined forces to ship used HP printer ink cartridges from state offices to Virginia to be ground up and recycled into auto parts, serving trays, clothes hangers and other products.But a Bee investigation, based on more than 100 pages of e-mails and other records, has found that 17 months after it was created, the program has delivered few if any of its promised climate benefits.
Almost from the start it ran into opposition from the state’s purchasing specialists at the Department of General Services, who were not consulted about it and who – once they started asking questions – turned up other concerns, including allegations of unfair competition and ink waste.They also favored reusing cartridges by refilling them at local businesses, a process known as remanufacturing.”It is to HP’s advantage to get as many remanufacturable cartridges off the market as possible,” Robert Tetz, manager of the department’s environmentally preferable purchasing program, said in an e-mail to his boss last year. “I don’t believe that this partnership arrangement passes the smell test.”
The recycling plan is one of many purportedly eco-friendly initiatives launched in California A state that portrays itself as a green-minded model for the world. But Scot Case, who investigates green marketing claims, said the state HP plan is the wrong choice for the environment.”It is completely ridiculous to ship a product from California to Virginia to be reground when you could refill those cartridges in California and reuse them,” said Case, vice president of TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, which places the green “EcoLogo” label on thousands of consumer products – but not on new printer cartridges.”You would use fewer resources,” Case said. “And you would create significantly less global warming impacts.”For their part, most DGS employees are not free to speak to The Bee. “We have a policy that we have high-level spokespeople … respond to questions,” said Jeffrey Young, the agency’s deputy director of public affairs.And Tetz, the green purchasing manager, has been ordered to clam up. “Bob, per my voicemail, I need you to stand down on any communication with Mr. Knudson. Call me …” Jim Butler, DGS’ chief procurement officer, said in an e-mail.
But their views come through clearly in electronic correspondence.
“The bottom line is that it is environmentally preferable and fiscally prudent to buy remanufactured toner cartridges for state laser printers from California small businesses,” wrote Ben Martin, an engineering branch manager at DGS, in an e-mail to a colleague.
Targeting a river of waste
Printer cartridges are a mainstay of the modern office – and a vexing waste problem. One 2007 industry report estimated 46 percent of the larger kind, known as laser jet cartridges, and 84 percent of the smaller inkjet cartridges are dumped in landfills after one use. A follow-up study, commissioned by HP, found 34 percent of the company’s laser jet cartridges and 78 percent of its inkjets end up in landfills after one use.The state-HP recycling effort was aimed at shrinking that river of waste by diverting up to 100 tons of spent state cartridges from landfills every year. But state and HP officials said it would have an additional benefit, striking a blow against climate change by curbing greenhouse gas emissions by 500 tons annually.Here’s how it was supposed to work: For every HP cartridge purchased and recycled, state agencies would earn points toward buying new, more energy-efficient HP printers. Top officials said that would trim power use and slice pollution.
The concept of green flows through much of what we do right now because we can see the ice caps melting, the pollution growing, and our energy prices starting to overtake our incomes.There are three kinds of green efforts: the first is focused on assuring a clean environment and has recycling at its core; the second is focused on conservation (generally energy related); and the third, and newest, is intelligent management which should help us get the greatest financial and environmental return from our green efforts.Last week at an Intel Alumni event, Andy Grove and a large number of ex and current Intel executives spoke on the need to respond to a Chinese effort to corner the market on both oil and solar technology by around 2020. This effort, if successful, would turn most of the rest of the world, especially the US, into a dependent of China. Something that, ironically, it doesn’t appear that China really wants.
This week HP was ranked by Newsweek #1 for their green efforts .
A few weeks after Greenpeace vandalized their offices. The organization increasingly looks to be more interested in getting publicity than in focusing on actually improving the world. This Greenpeace stuff seems incredibly irresponsible to me because it could have caused HP to reduce the strongest green effort in the US and turned it into a program like Apple’s which is simply designed to keep Greenpeace happy while not truly making the same kind of important difference. (The Apple ranking in Newsweek was 133.)
Becoming Energy Slaves
Boy if you want to have someone scare the living daylights out of you, listen to Andy Grove’s stump speech on energy.As you would expect given he is one of the most well known engineers in the world, his talk was full of well researched numbers and the ones that most stuck out was how China is in the process of purchasing most of the world’s oil production output, effectively turning that country not only into a mega-consumer of oil larger than the US, but one that controls vastly more of the world’s oil reserves than the US by the end of next decade.
This becomes a big problem for the US as soon as 2013.
Additional charts by both Grove and other executives pointed to the fact that China is not only starting to outspend us on solar research but, unlike other Chinese investments like this, they aren’t trying to be the low cost low technology provider in this market. They’re moving to be the low cost technology leader in the solar market.
If successful, the result would be that they would not only have the oil we need to operate the country in a few years but they will have replaced our own solar industry with theirs. Meaning, they would be the only real source for a strong alternative for electricity production (they largely use coal for electricity and we use oil). Effectively, if we wanted to drive or turn our lights on, it would be at the discretion of the Chinese political leaders and not our own.The irony in this is that, after listening to a specialist on Chinese Government, this result is likely as much to do with that Government’s inability to execute as it does the US’s. They don’t appear to want to be in this position. But the reasoning behind their action appears to be their inability to convert their own country to solar power quickly enough – coupled with the need to make sure their population doesn’t become too dissatisfied and revolt – topped with a government structure that allows them to respond to threats more quickly than the US.
You see, unlike the US, if the people in a state like China want to throw the bums out they tend to revolt and those in power often don’t survive the path to retirement. This motivates them much more aggressively to make sure folks aren’t unhappy and being without enough energy is likely a politician hunting season waiting to happen.In the end, I think the big message is that given Oil is funding the other side of the wars we are involved in, its cost is a major portion of why we both have an economic problem and can’t afford adequate healthcare. Additionally, it is sourced as the major ecological problem to solve, and it will likely eventually either result in a war or the US becoming a Chinese dependent (worse than we now are). Fixing this should have the highest priority.Either that or learning “yes boss” in Chinese (and I’ll bet you can guess my choice).
According to printer manufacturers, the path to going green and printing cheap starts at the product design stage. For instance, these hardware makers say they observe a conscious effort to produce printers that require fewer resources, namely, electricity, supplies and media.Lim Kok Hin, Canon Singapore’s senior director and general manager of domestic business imaging solutions and business solutions division, said multifunction devices (MFD), for example, are designed to allow businesses to consume less energy.”With the rising cost of energy, this quickly translates into tremendous savings for companies,” Lim told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail. Kasai Yasuhiro, Epson’s director of regional product management division, said its printing products were designed with “stringent energy and resource consumption targets, in relation to performance”.Older models are also replaced with new designs that make better use of resource. The vendor’s Stylus C110 business inkjet printer, for example, consumes 60 percent less energy than its predecessor Epson Stylus 87+, Kasai told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail.Its business laser printers, from standby or sleep mode, can complete printing the first page in 8 seconds. This minimizes the time the machine needs to be powered for print jobs, thus, reducing energy consumption, he said. “This is especially important as most print jobs are typically short runs comprising two to five pages,” he said.Ivy Liang, Asia-Pacific and Japan vice president of marketing at HP’s imaging and printing group, said the company’s “Instant-on Technology” is embedded in most of its LaserJet printers, enabling the machines to print the first page in 7.5 seconds from sleep mode.According to Canon’s Lim, companies tend to focus on larger business processes in their bid to achieve cost savings, leaving office printing costs unmanaged. Most are unaware how much their organizations are spending on their printing needs, he said.”Unmanaged print costs comprise 1 percent to 3 percent of a company’s revenue,” he noted, citing numbers from a February 2008 Gartner report. “Most organizations can experience significant cost savings with proper management of print processes.”
Duplex printing saves cost
Double-sided, or duplex printing is an effective component of a properly managed print policy, Lim said. Referring to the Gartner study, he said organizations can potentially reduce annual paper costs by at least 30 percent across their output by printing on both sides as part of the standard work process.Kasai noted that before an organization can enjoy such cost savings, all printers deployed in a company must support duplex capability and there must be a policy enforcing the use of duplex printing. “In some companies, this policy is forcibly imposed by IT administrators who set their printers to print duplex by default,” he said.
For HP, duplex printing helped the IT vendor cut its paper use by 25 percent during a pilot test, Liang said. The company is further tweaking its printing infrastructure to achieve the best cost savings, and expects to reduce its paper consumption by 800 tons annually when it has completed this initiative, she added.However, Graeme Philipson, research director at Connected Research, noted that while duplex printing may have its place in some circumstances, it may often be inappropriate in others. He added that it may even add to printing costs and the organization’s carbon footprint.In an e-mail interview, Philipson said studies have shown paper consumption represents only about 10 percent of total print costs. “That means duplex printing is addressing only 10 percent of the problem,” he said.He added that printers that support duplex printing also cost more, which may negate the cost advantage over the lifespan of the printer. Since their mechanisms are more complex, they are more likely to fail and need added maintenance that could be more expensive, said Philipson.
Reuse and recycle
Another avenue to save costs is through recycling, a practice that major printer vendors are advocating through their green programs.
Epson, for example, runs collection and recycling programs in 25 markets including Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Canon also has in place a global recycling program for used toner cartridges. In Singapore, for example, the company has four recycling locations for customers to drop off their used cartridges. Alternatively, businesses can arrange for used toner cartridges to be collected from their offices, provided they have at least 10 printer cartridges.
In this digital age, sending a letter seems pretty old fashioned to most. In fact, for people born in the eighties and nineties, to write longhand is a challenge. In the instances when e-mail seems unsuitable, it is simply much easier to compose our letters on computer, print them out and visit the post office to mail them.
A few weeks back, I was doing just that here in Tokyo when I noticed a metre-high white box — inscribed with the names of several well-known Japanese and international printer manufacturers — standing inside the entrance of my local post office. Don’t make the mistake of depositing your letter there. Instead, the next time your printer runs out of ink, take the empty cartridge and drop it into the white box to be recycled by manufacturers.
Believe it or not, every year the Japanese alone consume around 200 million ink cartridges and unfortunately in 2008 only 10% were returned for recycling. The remainder are thrown away and in Tokyo that likely means they are incinerated. A similar story can be found in the UK, where 65 million cartridges are sold each year and the recycling rate is only 15%, with the rest ending up in landfills.
Something had to be done about this terrible waste and the responsibility really resided with the manufacturers.
Cartridges off to Nagano
Two hours by train north-west of central Tokyo is Lake Suwa. The region is known as “The Oriental Switzerland.” Besides the breathtaking nature, the city of Suwa is home to a highly developed precision machinery industry, including one of Japan’s most well-known computer printer manufacturers, Seiko Epson Corporation. Epson employs 10,000 people here, making the company the biggest employer in the Nagano prefecture.
Using remanufactured (recycled) toner cartridges instead of new ones eliminates a waste stream and can reduce your Agency’s purchasing costs. Companies that refurbish and sell toner cartridges either pay postage for their return or will come to your offices and pick them up. Remanufactured cartridges also are less expensive than new ones. (Note: This tool calculates the savings from using remanufactured toner cartridges for laser printers. Copiers and fax machines can also use remanufactured cartridges; for more information, see toner cartridges in our virtual agency tour.)