Did your camera just run out of batteries again? Or maybe you lost the USB lead to transfer your photographs onto your PC? Well maybe it’s time for you to use some older technology.
This fun DIY project made by Dippold will have you gluing and snipping away till you end up with your own simple but very affective pinhole camera.
You can print off the template for the camera here, if you do get round to making it, please do send us the results.
Ink cartridges seem to be just another one of those everyday products that in some cases people dred buying, mainly because of the cost. But what alot of people don’t realise, including myself until I got into the printer business, is that printers aren’t just used for printing some work document anymore. As you’ll be able to see in some of the previous blog posts, printers are evolving into devices that you can carry around in your pocket, into 3D printers capable of printing whatever you please, bio-printers that use cells to build new organs, and much more.
But what about the ink itself? OK it’s true that most of the devices above don’t use ink, but when looking at the everyday printer, the ink it uses has pretty much stayed the same. Maybe it’s time to invent something new and exiting and of course more Eco-friendly. Well there are actually many types of ink out there apart from your everyday HP ink.
For example, have you ever heard of edible printer ink? No? Well there are many sites on the web selling just that. Ink cartridges for your printer filled with edible ink. They are used for printing onto icing sheets for cakes, etc. Just pop a edible ink cartridge into your printer and a sheet of icing paper into the paper tray and print away.
Another interesting example is actually glow in the dark printer ink. I havn’t been able to find any pre-filled glow in the dark cartridges, but below is a video showing how to make one yourself. Imagine the wonders you could print using glow in the dark ink!
Here we have another concept eco-printer, the REENK by Hyo Sun Ahn & Min Koung So. Similar to the Pencil lead printer, the REENK uses the leftover ink from ballpoint pens after they stop working. The only flaws I can see with this design is that you would probably have to buy specific CMYK pens that would probably be more expensive than your avarage ballpoint pen, and when have you ever used a yellow pen? The concept is still a great one though.
This handmade epson ink cartridge lamp is made from just that, and it looks wierdly cool. Its fairly expensive if you want one at $200, but so are the cartridges that its made from. Its the second best thing you can do with your empty ink cartridges, the first being sending them in to us to recycle.
I bet that at some point in your life you’ve wondered what would happen if you put an ink cartridge in a microwave. Actually the though probabily has never crossed your mind, but I’m going to show you a video of someone microwaving a cartridge anyway. (Don’t try this at home)
It’s roughly how I imagined what it would look like, a burning plastic mess in a microwave.
Here’s another eco-friendly printer, and like the pencil printer it doesn’t use a conventional ink. Instead it uses used ground coffee to print its documents, you just pour used coffee grounds into the printers’ cartridge and then move the cartridge from side to side till your document has printed. So basically your doing quite a lot of the printing work for it, but this whole concept has no need for a power source or ink cartridges, so it really is eco-friendly.
Think of your pocket! Most Hp ink cartridges are worth money as an empty. You could cash them in through our HP ink cartridge recycling scheme. Donate the money to charity or have the cash back against your next order or to save for life’s little extra’s.
Think Conservation! It takes more than 90mls of oil when producing an average hp ink cartridge. For every cartridge that has been recycled it means that one less new cartridge has been sold, less sales means less production which means less oil being used!
Think of the Environment! Hp printer cartridges are made of plastics and metals that will take 100’s of years to decompose when buried in landfill sites, that’s if they decompose at all. These days we are more than aware that land filling Hp ink cartridges is not a good idea at all.
Other reasons to recycle your printer cartridges….
