It seems to be a no-brainer in Madison, aka recycletown. But until now, consumers here have had few convenient retail options for buying recycled printer and toner cartridges. Caboodle Cartridge aims to fill this niche. It opened its first store here last month at 2528 University Ave. It's one of three locations franchise owner Marianne Gariti plans to open in the area. The shop sells remanufactured cartridges for top selling printers including Hewlett-Packard, Canon and Epson. Toner or ink refilling is done at the company's Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters. Gariti orders what she needs to stock her shelves from the firm, and sells the cartridges for an average of 50 percent below regular retail prices. Caboodle Cartridge also accepts used cartridges from individuals, business, schools and organizations as well. It can offer between $4 and $13 for a usable empty cartridge. "There are a lot of the empty cartridges out there that have value," Gariti said. "Caboodle takes those, refills them and puts them back onto the market." Printer cartridge refilling is not new. But some original equipment manufacturers have claimed that refilled cartridges don't perform well, producing poor quality prints and clogging machine parts with lower quality ink. To overcome some of these issues, Caboodle Cartridge refills the cartridges with automated equipment using high-quality inks, tests the products and repackages them for sale in its stores. "I didn't notice any difference," Steve Hoff, vice president at Flad Development in Madison, said of the quality of the recycled Hewlett- Packard cartridges he recently purchased. Hoff purchased cartridges for his home office to test the product for Flad. He expects that Flad will begin to recycle and buy from Caboodle Cartridge. Hoff said he likes the idea of recycling cartridges, plus the cost savings is significant - about 40 percent below regular retail, by his estimate. Other Madison companies including ShadowFax and Cartridge Savers also sell recycled printer cartridges, primarily to business customers. And you can recycle your old cartridges at a number of locations here, including office supply chains such as Office Depot, Office Max and Staples according to the online recycling directory earth911.org. The city of Madison will even send envelopes to consumers interested in recycling their home printer cartridges. Madison works with Illinois-based AAA Environmental Inc., which pays the city about $1 for each cartridge sent from this municipality. It amounts to about $40 a month, said city recycling coordinator George Dreckmann, and is offered primarily as a service to residents. "There's a lot of technology in those cartridges and that's where the profit lies in getting the technology sent back, refill it and resell it for less," Dreckmann said. Gariti said her shop has gotten a good reception. "It's no fun to go out and buy a cartridge and pay huge prices," she said. "There's also the recycling aspect. People feel good about it."
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