By Steve Morriss, Founder and Executive Director of Close the Loop®
Close the Loop® (CtL) is an Australian cartridge collection and recycling company with businesses in Melbourne AU and Kentucky USA, and the game changing brand promise – ‘Zero Waste to Landfill’
Toner and ink cartridges are complex products. Let’s start by breaking this waste stream down into three separate groups – all-in-one toner cartridges, toner bottles, and inkjet cartridges. See the table below for more detail.
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Close the Loop changed the game when 15 years ago we adopted the commitment to zero waste to landfill. This high benchmark is independently audited each year and we are extremely proud to have successfully achieved our Brand promise every year since inception.
Today, we have over 35,000 active collection sites across Australia including one of the most successful recycling programs in the world, the Cartridges 4 Planet Ark program that we co-created with Planet Ark over 12 years ago. We manage imaging supplies (cartridges) at end of life (EoL) for the original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s) including Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, Brother, Toshiba, Sharp, Fuji Xerox, Kyocera, Epson, Oki, and Lanier.
Thousands of bags of cartridges enter our unique facility every month and their first stop is sorting and data capture. This is where every single cartridge is identified by brand, type, and origin. The cartridges then travel down a large conveyor where they are sorted for either reuse or recycling. If our customer, the OEM, has a reuse program for specific part numbers, we separate, test, clean and pack for shipping to any part of the world. Where OEM reuse programs do not exist, we sort by the major categories listed in table 1, and process via a dedicated recycling line for that category. In general terms, the recycling involves size reduction (shredding / grinding / granulating) and materials separation (magnets, eddy current, induction, and specific gravity).
The raw materials arising from our recycling lines (metals and plastics) are recycled as commodities back into the circular economy with less than 10% by weight being so heavily contaminated it needs to be recycled via waste to energy, where the calorific value of the waste stream replaces natural gas in a cement making process. The ink we extract from some inkjet cartridges either goes into our range of innovative, recycled content felt tip pens, or is modified for use as a black printing ink for flexographic printing on cardboard packaging.
Our most challenging output material has been mixed toner powder which has recently made headlines for our innovative asphalt additive products based on recycled toner powder. In partnership with Downer, many kilometres of ‘low carbon asphalt’ has been turned into suburban roads all around Australia.
Steve and our industrial chemist David, filming for a case study with Sustainability Victoria.