“Orinoco Crafts save thousands by refilling their Hewlett Packard printer cartridges!

Orinoco Crafts design and print a range of unique items for the craft makers market. They sell these from their website, through wholesalers and craft supplies shops and trade shows.

As many of their paper items are printed on their Hewlett Packard Colour Laserjet 3500 printer, the cost of the toner is a major part of their cost of production. They recently have had their products included in a pack featured on QVC television which has led to two large orders.

The first order was for 11,000 sheets and was printed using a total of 25 original HP toner cartridges at a cost of £1,684 or £153 per 1000 sheets. Through buying in bulk they were already getting a good discount off the list price. The first order was a great success and quickly led to a follow up order for another 25,000 sheets.

Looking for a more economical way of handling the printing, they explored the possibility of refilling their cartridges with toner powder from TonerTopUp. Wendy Beardmore, their designer, was impressed by the way they were given the support they needed to try out refilling and the touch of humour in the TonerTopUp toolkit they used.

We have saved thousands!” she says. “We had kept the empty cartridges from the first run and so had only to buy two more black ones for the next 25,000 sheet order. We found we could refill the colour cartridges up to 7 times, an average of 5 times, but the black ones did not seem to last so long. We only got an average of one and a half refills of these.” Overall the cost of refill toner and chips for the 25,000 sheets was only £1,064, a saving of £2,630 over the cost of the 41 cartridges used. The cost per 1000 sheets was £48, and the percentage saving was 69%. For the next run they will have to buy more cartridges as they have worn out most of the original 25 cartridges. This will reduce the savings they expect to only 62%.

The great thing about the refilling is that as well as saving thousands they have also saved 38 cartridges from the landfill site and also all the energy and precious materials that would have gone into another 38 cartridges. The environmental double whammy is the icing on the cake!