Recyclia has launched the first collective system in our country to collect and manage the toner and ink cartridges of printers, whose recycling must be financed and managed by manufacturers from next August 15. The new systems, called Tragatóner and Tragatinta, respectively, make Recyclia an entity with the capacity to recycle all types of electronic waste.

Tragatóner and Tragatinta take advantage of the resources and synergies of Recyclia’s 15 years of experience in waste management of office and printing equipment – through the Ecofimática foundation, which represents 90% of the manufacturers of this type of equipment in our country and it has already managed 44,000 tons of waste – and offers two effective, proven and fully operational solutions, with the cost savings that entails.

In its first year of activity, Recyclia plans to collect 1,000 tons of printing consumables (some 6.6 million units), the equivalent of 65% of the kilos placed on the market by the manufacturers adhering to Ecofimática. The ink cartridges, coming mostly from the domestic channel, will represent 23%, and the remaining 77% will correspond to toner cartridges, whose main collection channel will be the distribution channel.

Recyclia will base its strategy on proximity to users, for which it will install, in just one year, 42,000 collection points in large stores and commercial establishments, large companies, public buildings and clean points. It will also create a web page and a mobile application to consult the nearest points and certify the traceability of the containers, from their origin in the distributor or company requesting the collection, to their final processing in the treatment plants.

According to José Pérez, CEO of Recyclia, “an end user can discard a printer after 4 or 5 years on average, but replace a cartridge every 4 or 5 months. Our objective is to offer an effective, operative and guarantee solution of compliance with regulations and to make users aware of the importance of recycling waste, whose most frequent current destination is the garbage container “.

Currently, in our country, there are two vacuum printing consumable collection systems: on the one hand, the systems of each manufacturer to recover their own cartridges, and on the other hand, the managers that collect those that have a resale value for the called remanufacturers, who reintroduce them into the market, subtracting sales from the original consumables.

As of August 15, the printing consumables with electrical parts, that is to say the majority of those that are commercialized, will be considered electronic devices and, therefore, the same obligations will apply to them as to the rest of the hardware. Until the next change of regulations, environmental responsibility falls on the user.

From day 15, the producers of consumables will be responsible for financing and organizing the collection of this waste, as well as meeting the collection target set for the rest of electronic devices: in 2018, 55% of the average weight of the cartridges introduced in the Spanish market in the three previous years. According to Recyclia, an objective difficult to reach, through the programs of recycling of consumables of each manufacturer, to be limited to their own products.

Likewise, the distributors of consumables must collect the cartridge in disuse, in case the consumer acquires a new one, and the establishments of more than 400 m2 will have to have containers to collect the used consumable, without needing the purchase of another one. In addition, online sales will have the same obligations as physical establishments.

Source: industriagraficaonline.com