CDs with colourful but always green packaging!

Digital Data Ltd of Sevenoaks in Kent specialise in the rapid turnaround of short production runs of CDs and DVDs. They also provide a service to digitise documents into Acrobat format. The CDs and DVDs they produce are often surface printed and accompanied in the jewel cases by printed insert sheets or booklets. They use thermal or screen printing for the discs themselves depending on the order size and type.

For printing the inserts they installed an A3 Xerox Phaser colour LED printer in February 2004 and initially bought Xerox toner cartridges. "The printer works well but it doesn't half chew through the toner", says Chris Lupton. "Much of our work is A3 size and the coverage can be up to 60% so we get nowhere near the number of pages quoted at the nominal 5% coverage. The 15,000 sheet nominal cartridge can sometimes last only 1,500 sheets! At £149 each, that's expensive!"

"In June last year I looked around to save cost and started refilling the cartridges with refill toner from TonerTopUp. I am happy reusing them as I haven't noticed any deterioration in terms of the print quality and the refills are a lot cheaper. The colour balance has not changed and there are no problems with adhesion."

"I have bought 19 colour refills and 4 black over the last 13 months at a total cost of £1326. This has saved me £1829, or 58%, against the cost of the equivalent Xerox cartridges. I am happy going down this route. So far I have still been refilling the original set of Xerox cartridges, but the day will come when I have to buy a new set of cartridges."

The 23 cartridges that Chris has not bought due to reusing the old ones represent a significant amount of plastic and other material that has not been used and will not end up in the rubbish. A useful environmental bonus to his cost cutting measures! His colourful inserts are really pretty green.