Hewlett Packard Hates Recyclers

I was reading the Sunday papers and couldn't quite believe this full page advertisement from HP.

In a year when even George Bush has gone green, when Apple are simultaneously being chided for not being green enough, and praised for reducing CD wastage, when schools that refuse to show An Inconvenient Truth are viewed with suspicion, Hewlett Packard decided to spend a few thousand pounds on a full colour, full page ad literally telling us not to recycle. Here's a few choice words from the decidedly un-green HP:

“Put a cut-price own-label cartridge in your HP printer and there's a one in six chance of it failing. That's because even though it looks new, it's used. Refilled and repackaged over and over.“

Every time I read this I struggle to comprehend how, in 2007, a company as big as HP can be so out of touch with the consensus forming around green ideas such as 'reduce, reuse, recycle'. Even snippets like this one seem to be hugely misguided - 'No-one would dream of selling used food. So why do they sell used print cartridges?' They even go on to state that 'not even HP can refill a cartridge and guarantee the quality'. Which makes you wonder just how bad things are going to get, until you read the next sentence where they proudly state that 'we make them from scratch. New ink, new print head, new everything'.

HP, if you're reading this, you could solve this problem by diverting the resources you spent on attaching chips to printers that exist only to prohibit refilling into creating cheap, recyclable and/or refillable cartridges. Whilst I understand that you want to guarantee the quality of ink used in your printers, this over reliance on DRM for ink (of all things) is very much out of step with the sustainable ideas that a lot of us are trying to adopt. Next time, why not just offer a free recycling scheme where we can send you our used cartridges knowing that they'll be turned into new HP cartridges. That way you can guarantee the quality of your ink and we can choose to recycle with you, rather than with the refillers. Reply to this article / Report this article
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