Recylcing Empty Ink Cartridges - Any Good?

Before answering the question lets look at some facts first.

A recent study done by a US based agency the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has found that 67% of the empty cartridges are sent to landfills, 15% are burnt to ashes and a mere 18% are recycled.

If the percentages don’t look intimidating enough, here are some actual figures, every year over 400 million cartridges with a combined weight of 200 million pounds are dumped into landfills.

Source :-http://www.chasdoc.org/2006/articles/article10.htm

Printers came into widely use together with the computer and taking a time span of say 20 years, 20 multiply by 400 million gives 8 billion cartridges being dumped into land fills. 8 billion, this number more than human population of 6 billion plus on Earth. This is to say every human on Earth contributed more than 1 cartridges dumped into land fills.

Looking at the figure, that's a lot of plastic thrown and this is excluding other forms of plastic. So if one now is to answer the above question in the tittle, the answer is a definite YES.

I read through the whole article above (quoted source) and the writer had made a number of very good points about recycling empty ink cartridges. One the point is that by not throwing away the cartridges you can donate them to some institutions which generate money by recycling cartridges. An example of this is Oxfam which helps to raise money from empty ink cartridges. Here is the Oxam's link:-
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/recycle/index.html

Visited the link and it's still valid. Hence beside helping charity works, recycling of ink cartridges helps to :-

1. Help to reduce our ink cost, as recycled ink cartridges are much cheaper compared to new cartridges.
2. Not forgetting that this way we can help reduce pollution and reduce the amount of plastic that goes into landfills and polluting the earth.

Thus lets start recycling ink cartridges now and not wait.