HP Innovation Journal Issue 14: Spring 2020 | Page 51

Amid humming machinery, beeping forklifts,
and the steady work of employees in safety gear,
spent HP ink cartridges enter their afterlife—a very
productive one. On a typical day at HP’s recycling plant
in La Vergne, Tennessee, about half an hour outside
of Nashville, workers in orange vests and steel-toed
shoes load cartridges onto conveyor belts. Others
remove extraneous materials from the line of cartridges
gliding by, ensuring they are disassembled in a way that
maximizes the reuse of their components.
As the employees work, they are also helping to usher in
a transformation in the printing industry—away from
sending printers and cartridges to landfills, and instead
integrating them into a circular economy that reuses
materials again and again.
HP is on the cusp of the transformation, with an
ambitious goal for all of its personal systems and print
products to contain at least 30% recycled plastic by 2025.
With its current portfolio at 7%, HP is taking steps to
push the limits of technical innovation in recycling.
“The way we are going to get there is to figure out how
we can recapture all the material we are putting out
into the world and reuse every single bit of it,” says
Ellen Jackowski, Global Head of Sustainability Strategy
& Innovation at HP. At HP’s recent Innovation for
Sustainable Impact Summit in Nashville, Jackowski
announced the release of the HP Tango Terra, which hits
the 30% recycled target and uses cartridges that contain
up to 73% recycled materials.
HP’s recycling effort also includes about 400 employees
who work at the La Vergne facility’s two buildings,
which are located across the street from each other
and managed by Sims Recycling Solutions. One plant
processes cartridges, and the other processes hardware,
including printers and laptops. One of those employees,
Tania Damaso, has worked at the recycling facility for
about a year. She says that staff meetings always include
information about recycling, and she likes that her job
keeps plastic out of the environment.
“This is the earth,” she says. “We have to take care of it.”
FROM OLD TO NEW
The recycling chain for HP cartridges begins with
customers, who have multiple options for sending their
used cartridges into the circular system through the HP
Planet Partners return and recycling program, which
operates in 76 countries and territories around the world.
People can use pre-addressed recycling envelopes. They
can order free cardboard boxes from HP. Or they can
drop cartridges off at stores, including Staples, Office
Depot, Walmart, and Best Buy.
Customers who take the time to mail or drop off their
used cartridges instead of throwing them away are
essential players in HP’s recycling goals, says Shelley
Zimmer, Sustainable Impact Program Manager at HP.
“It demonstrates to me how much people care about the
environment and about doing their individual part to
make a difference,” she says.
Inside a cavernous warehouse at the La Vergne plant,
thousands of cartridges fill large cardboard boxes, which
line the floor and fill the shelves of 30-foot-tall steel
racks. The cartridges have been sent in by customers
in Canada, Latin America (cartridges from Brazil are
recycled in São Paulo), and around the United States.
Damaso and her coworkers send the cartridges into a
high-speed sorting line, where a conveyor belt carries
different inkjet cartridge types beneath a high-definition
camera, which funnels them into pathways with
cartridges of the same type. The machine can distinguish
up to 12 types of cartridges and sorts as many as 300 a
minute, using artificial intelligence and machine learning
to achieve about a 98% accuracy rate. As the cartridges
move down the belt they are blown by air jets into a grid
of boxes, separating them by type.
Some cartridges then go through the reverse engineering
process that disassembles cartridges, component by
component. Labels come off. Lids are removed and
dropped into a bin for recovery. Foam is removed.
Flexible circuits and the printhead are removed, and the
plastic is dropped into a bin to be combined with plastic
from the recovered lids.
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