In this day and age, buying ink and toner cartridges is a major expense for both home users and businesses alike  . Finding a way to  cut  costs can be grueling as is seen by the number of people who search online each day using phrases such as Cheap printer Cartridges, refill ink Cartridges, ink cartridges cheap and the list goes on. 
One option for saving money is to look at the benefits of recycling or refilling ink and toner cartridges.

Did you know?

• Worldwide every year more than one billion ink cartridges are used and most are thrown in to landfill sites, where they take 1000′s of years to break down.
• Stacked end to end, cartridges thrown away in one year would cover a distance of over 24,0000 miles (enough to circle the earth) (Recharger Magazine 08/02)
• Roughly 3.5 litres of oil are needed to make one new laser cartridge (Recycler Magazine 05/03)

If you are going to use recycled ink cartridges,  you nee to make sure that the ink or toner cartridges you are buying are up to the job. There are many companies out there that supply sub standard cartridges, which will either not work properly or even at all  . Not every vendor of Cheap printer cartridges is selling cartridges which are good enough to use in a business  environment  . Indeed there are many stories of poor quality refill ink cartridges causing damage to printers.

Even if you decide to buy new rather than used cartridges , there are still some ways in which you can save money on ink. Our top tips include:

• Avoid printing at all if you can read the item easily on the screen.
• Print in “fast draft” (or whatever terminology your printer uses) if the copy is just for internal use because it can save a huge amount of  ink, although some printers have awful print quality in that mode. 
• Some printers use a single cartridge for the coloured inks. This can be wasteful if you are often printing documents with a large amount of one colour on it because the cartridge will need to be replaced even though only one of the 3 colours is empty. Get round this problem either by choosing a printer which has three separate colour cartridges or print in greyscale (no colour) when possible.