Help Us Plant A Whole Forest 🌲
With Your Printer Cartridges 🖨️
We offer free better-than-recycling services in the 🇬🇧 UK, 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇦🇺 Australia and the 🇺🇸 United States to pick up your full & unused printer cartridges and find new homes for them.
And we plant 2 trees 🌲🌲 on your behalf with our partner charity Trees for the Future for every unused cartridge we receive — a unique & tangible opportunity to offset your CO2 footprint!
Since 2015 thousands of individuals & businesses have rehomed unwanted printer cartridges with us & planted an entire forest of trees — 165,474 to date!
📈 total progress so far: 2015 → 2026
🖨️
35,000
cartridges
repurposed by our 1,000s of supporters instead of recycled
🌲
165,474
trees
planted with our charity partner Trees For The Future
🌎
29,785
tons of CO2
captured by these trees based on 180kg CO2 sequestered over a tree's lifetime
⭐️ our charity partner: Trees For The Future 🌿
We're proud to be an official partner of Trees For The Future — they've planted over 344 million trees in total working with local farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to plant trees in 'forest gardens' that provide food, shelter, and a future for their families.
🔎 our focus on full & unused cartridges
You're probably very familiar with recycling empty cartridges — after all it can seem like every second week we need to replace them...
But in our experience around 1 in 4 offices & homes also has 1 or more unused printer cartridge just gathering dust...
Recycling these unused cartridges is a huge waste of resources — they can be used as they are without a wasteful recycling process — and that's what our better-than-recycling service is about.
Maybe you recently upgraded your printer & have some remaining toners for the old printer? — Or clearing out cupboards and discovered ink cartridges you'd long forgotten about?
⚠️ Don't recycle them with your empty cartridges, don't return them to the manufacturer for recycling!
Better that these find a second life with somebody else who has the same printer!
from small seedlings all great forests begin 🌿
👉 the journey to 150,000 trees
2015 — On a cold, wet day in Scotland (which is, let's face it, almost every day in Scotland), we decided it was a real shame that cartridges were being junked, when they could have had a second life...
Several cups of tea later, all while watching the rain drip off the Scots Pines, cartridgeforest was born — we would offer to plant trees in exchange for them in partnership with Trees For The Future...
... we'd finally get people more enthusiastic about recycling, help offset the CO2 emissions of all the printing we do, and close the circle on those idiots who print out every email they receive.
🎉 Key Milestones
2020 — we celebrated our 🎉 50,000th tree planted & decided to focus only on handling unused cartridges.
2021 — we opened the service up to the 🇺🇸 United States and 🇨🇦 Canada to help improve the environment around the world.
2022 — we reached the 🎉 100,000 trees level — a great landmark, and around 18,000 tons of CO2 sequestered.
2024 & onwards... we opened up to 🇦🇺 Australia, which helped us reach 150,000 trees this year...!
