In Germany alone, some 20 million used print heads and roughly 6.5 million toner modules are thrown away every year. However, Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH sees its task not only in providing customers with new print heads, but also in taking back used print heads and toner modules in order to recycle them.

For this purpose there are collection containers available to customers in the stores' multimedia departments. This collection system currently receives roughly 1,000 components monthly, which is a long way from making full use of its capacities.

Old becomes new
With the collection of used print head and toner modules KARSTADT Warenhaus GmbH contributes to the reduction of waste and saving resources, because the used components are recycled by Pelikan-Hardcopy and return to the trade in the form of new printer cartridges and toner modules. Since the start of the campaign in October 2000, we have collected approximately 75,000 printer cartridges or toner modules respectively in our stores and have fed them into the recycling process.
(Publication date: December 2006)