Ink Jet Cartridges

Among the many things I've done to earn a crust is to work in a company that collected used ink jet cartridges. As you know, these are cleaned up and sent off to the people who make "recycled " ink jet cartridges. You see the collection boxes all over the place, in stores, sometimes in schools and corporations have been selling them to recyclers for decades. Of course, everyone we know recycles, never throwing such things away at all.
That might not actually be true. In the US each year some 400 million of these things are sold, and less than 100 million are recycled. So there's a fair number that don't make it to the Staples or WalMart recycling bin.
You might also be surprised at the value these things have. Yes, there are some with no value at all ( Epson, for example ) and some worth 10 or 20 cents. However, it can be quite shocking how much the more popular HP, Canon and Lexmark models can be. The HP 51620/26/29 models ( Deskjets from a couple of years ago ) and the 6656/7/8 ( New Colour Deskjets), and at least 50 % of the Lexmark models are worth $ 5 - $ 6 EACH. .
No, that isn't the price you will get if you send 5 of them in for recycling. This is because recycling, like all scrap industries, works completely the other way round from what you might expect. We all know that if you buy a truckload of something, each unit costs less than if you buy one unit. With scrap it's the other way round. The more units you have, the more each unit is worth. This is because the recyclers want to have 1,000 or 10,000 pieces at a time to run through their machines.
So there is a value to having people send all of their empties to one place, sorting throught them and then selling them. We'll get the best price for them.