Colour ink cartridges for HP, Lexmark, Samsung, Dell and some Canon come as one cartridge. For example HP 351(CB336) or HP351XL(CB338) has three colours Cyan, Magenta and Yellow in one cartridge in a separate chambers.

Imagine you are printing some documents. And this document has your company logo, and this company logo is of one or two colours only. For e.g. Your logo is in a Green Colour. So naturally Yellow and Cyan will have to be mixed together to produce a Green colour. Rest of your documents is in standard Black colour text. Naturally Yellow colour is going to run out first if you are printing this multiple copies.

Since you have run out of Yellow Ink, there is still Magenta and Cyan ink in the chambers of ink cartridges. However this cartridge will now register as an empty ink. With frustration you go out and buy a new cartridge and send the old empty ink cartridge for recycling.

But wait – Stop!

Before you do this, did you know that you still had ink in the chambers which you could reuse again. Yes all you would require is a syringe and a small bottle to store this inks. I wouldn’t advise of leaving the empty cartridge as it is as it would dry out after a while. So best thing is to peel the top label off. Insert a toothpick through holes and just dip this toothpick to see what colour that chamber is. Now insert the needle and suck the ink.

 Easy. Next time you run out ink, instead of buying another ink cartridges, just peel the label off, refill with this stored ink. Your cartridges will last longer. And more importantly you would have saved money and our Planet from destruction!

There will be other posts I will be writing about, such as best printers to buy and Printers to avoid. Also there are some cartridges that can’t be recycled and as such please be advise to stay away from them. But I will catch up with this topics later on.