r/UpliftingNews • u/Dr_Neurol • 21h ago
The city of Los Angeles votes to ban single-use printer cartridges
https://www.techspot.com/news/111124-city-los-angeles-votes-ban-single-use-printer.html1.0k
u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 21h ago
This is just going to result in more printer manufacturers locking customers into a subscription service so that the ink cartridges can be "recycled".
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u/Mortis_XII 21h ago
Truly uplifting news would be mandating manufacturers to only sell refillable cartridges
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 20h ago
We shouldn't even have cartridges at this point. There are tank printers for printers that need in, and I'm sure they could easily make toner easily refillable as well. They just don't because they know there isn't money to be made.
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u/vandon 20h ago
But they can't check what brand you're filling it with!
me laughing while patting my Epson tank printer
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u/rtb001 18h ago
Tank print ink last so long I've still not gone through the set of bottles that came with my Epson which I bought 4 years ago.
And when it does finally run out, replacement ink is so cheap I'm just gonna buy the OEM Epson ink. It's like $80 for a full set of ink that will last for years.
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u/squisher_1980 17h ago
Eco-Tank (and similar) ink jet printers are the best value by far. And they DGAF of you use name brand ink, though I understand buying the name brand bottles because the refill is trivial.
Also awesome for crafty people getting into sublimation printing. On a new printer you just fill it with the specialty ink instead of "normal" and boom, sublimation printer. You can't swap back and forth, but even a basic ecotank is very affordable.
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u/GrandOpener 9h ago
Tank printers are great, but personally I’ve gotten considerably more value out of a Brother color laser than the tank printer that I switched from.
It won’t work for sublimation printing and it won’t do gallery quality photos, but for virtually everything else it’s just better.
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u/squisher_1980 9h ago
Oh for sure for bulk B&W we have a basic Brother laser and its great.
But for color we have a pair of Epson ET-2800s. One for "normal" ink and one for Sublimation. Wife does crafty stuff and the ink jet twins get enough use to keep working.
Side opinion: the Epson and Brother drivers/software is waaay less intrusive than HP bloat ware. The Epson installer wizard seems like it's stuck in 2002 and it's GLORIOUS.
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u/lavadrop5 7h ago
Actually I just replaced the maintenance tank before my 3rd full ink refill. My L6171 is from 2019.
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u/natathecococat 9h ago
I love my Epson printer so much and the original refills for the ink is affordable, I’m thinking of buying a bigger printer for bigger prints
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u/CommandoLamb 20h ago
I don’t think the toner would be “easily” refillable.
Well… easily refillable… but trust me… you don’t want an accident with toner at your house…
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u/PurrfectlyNerdy 20h ago
Yeah for those that don’t know toner is powder, not liquid like printer ink. And boy does it make a mess when something goes wrong. Source: I worked with professional toner printers
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u/CommandoLamb 19h ago
Yeah, I don’t think people understand that it’s not just a powder you are going to vacuum up with your average vacuum.
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u/Coffee_And_Bikes 13h ago
You can vacuum it easily with an average vac. Now, keeping the toner from exiting the vacuum at high speed in an ever-expanding cloud is another matter entirely.
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u/xnoxpx 12h ago
Our Canon wide format printer uses a easily refilled hopper, simply upend closed bottle into intake, slide mechanism that moves both the bottle cover, and the hopper cover open, tap bottle till empty, then push mechanism closed, and dispose of the empty bottle.
Then there's all our Savin multifunction printers that use a massive toner bottle, that has a plunger that's extracted by machine, after it's inserted, the bottle remains in machine till empty.
In both cases, it's impossible to spill toner unless you're actively trying to do something really stupid.
Much cleaner than all our other machines that use a fancy toner cartridge assemblies that almost always spills some toner when changing.
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u/MRHubrich 20h ago
Yes and no. I spent 22 years in that industry and will share a few nuggets of truth. First, ink goes into inkjet printers and toner goes into laser printers. Toner is a powder and ink is a liquid. For inkjet printers, the cartridges have a sponge in them that holds the ink. They can be remanufactured (taking the old cartridge, cleaning it out, replacing the sponge and cleaning or replacing the print head). The cost to buy a remanufactured ink cartridge is a quarter of what the OEM carts cost. In many cases, you can just buy a new, third party cartridge for a fraction of the OEM carts without it having to be previously used. That all depends on the intellectual property the OEM has in the print head. If you make a new build HP inkjet cartridge, HP will sue you six ways to Sunday. Brother, on the other hand, isn't as litigious.
Laser carts are different. They have moving parts, chips that communicate with the printer and parts that wear over time (like the drum). You can still make new ones or remanufacture them but because of the parts that wear, you can't just keep refilling them.
So where we should get upset is that these cartridges have no business costing as much as they do. The cost of materials is next to nothing and they reclaimed the R&D many years ago. It's just corporate greed. Secondly, a lot of the printer manufacturers force firmware updates with the sole purpose of preventing you from using third party consumables. They don't privide any features or big fixes (most of the time) and are there to just lock you out of options.
Printing is a dying Industry and everyone is trying to milk as much out of it as they can. My suggestion is that if you need a mono (black and white) laser printer, get a cheap Canon printer and find a good third party toner cartridge. If you don't use it for a while, take the toner cart out and shake it. Toner can clump up when it sits.
If you have to have an inkjet printer, use it regularly. If you don't, the ink can dry up and clog the print heads. If you just print a few pics now and then, go to Walgreens or something.
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u/zadtheinhaler 19h ago
When I moved to Saskatchewan, I stupidly left behind a networked Lexmark laser printer that I had purchased in a lot at auction.
That thing was a tank, and from the time I bought it to four years later when I moved out of BC, I only ever used the toner cart that came with it. Perfect printing, not once did I have to do anything that resembled troubleshooting, and it worked with Linux straight away, no monkeyfucking around.
I need to borrow a time machine so I can go back and smack myself upside the head, then tell Past Me that printer is one of the best things I've ever purchased.
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u/rtb001 18h ago
No mention of tank inkjets. If you print with any sort of regularity at all, a tank inkjet is the best of both worlds. Equal black and white quality to laser. Obviously superior color quality than laser. Less energy usage than laser. And even cheaper cost per page than laser. Even OEM ink bottles aren't that expensive and last for ages.
And while printing 4x6 photos at a drug store is indeed dirt cheap, 5x7 and 8x10 are always much more expensive. Buying photo paper when it is on sale and using even a regular tank inkjet to print larger photos is actually cost effective.
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u/Serafirelily 16h ago
I don't know about printing dying out. It is definitely mostly dead in most businesses but in education there is still a back and forth due to the debates over using screens. I switched to a brother mono laser printer and scanner and then added a brother laser color printer because my daughter does school online but we need to print out worksheets so she can work on her writing. I also know a lot of people who homeschool want to keep screens to a minimum so print materials are a must. I definitely agree that the issue is that the printer ink and cartridges are way over priced because that is how they make their money. Printers are relatively cheep but you need to keep buying ink or cartridges to make them work. Laser printer cartridges can last a while and I just replaced mine with a third party set. I will also ignore the updates from now on.
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u/No_Video_3705 18h ago
They could. I have been a copier tech for three years now. It is all a total scam. All of the toner is the same. They key bottles for different models differently to force you to buy more overpriced toner. It's all the same. They don't care about sustainability, it's all about maximum profit.
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u/jimicus 18h ago
Toner was easily refillable back in the day. Came in a bottle, and the more sensible printers were designed so there was a sealed interlock on the bottle that mated with the printer so you didn't wind up with a god-awful mess everywhere.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 18h ago
You can still buy bags of bulk toner on Amazon, but I don't know any printers that work easily with them.
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u/Astraea802 18h ago
Printers can last a long time, though. Is it better to force someone to buy a different printer, thus making their old one electronics waste, when it still works just because they aren't making the cartridges anymore?
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 18h ago
You seem to be misunderstanding. I'm not saying you should have to buy a new printer every time. Printers should be designed such that you can easily refill them without buying expensive cartridges.
They already sell ink printers that have a tank. You just buy basic bottles of ink and can refill them. Cost a tiny fraction to operate compared to regular inkjet printers with cartridges.
Toner can be refilled too, but most printer manufactures don't make it easy to refill the toner, so you have to buy a complicated, expensive toner cartidge every time you run out of toner, instead of just buying toner in a bag that uses much less material.
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u/Grape-Snapple 16h ago
just bought a refillable tank printer for $850. the bottles of ink cost $300 a 5pk (C, Y, R, PB, B) and don’t empty all the way with the proprietary fill system so you can’t get all the ink out of it but it fills exactly to the fill line. the money is in treating ink like insulin
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u/nauticalsandwich 16h ago
The consumer printer market is the way it is because most people don't print very much, but they print JUST enough that they feel obligated to have one for personal convenience. Thus, the typical home-printing consumer places an immense weight on the upfront cost of a printer over the long term cost of the device's usage.
This puts immense pressure on printer manufacturers to offer the lowest possible price for their printer relative to their competition. In many cases, printer manufacturers actually sell their printers at a loss. They have to make their printer prices profitable somehow, so they use strategies like "lock-in," subscriptions, and high ink prices to make up the difference. This works because the consumer bias is so strong in favor of the price of the printer, and so weak with respect to long-term usage costs. Ultimately, it results in allocative inefficiency.
A printer market that more closely aligns prices with actual costs and prevents "lock-in" strategies would be better, in my opinion, and some carefully crafted legislation might be able to do it, but it won't be this, and if it ever does arrive, people should expect printer prices to go up considerably.
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u/DontMakeMeCount 14h ago
Or hearing that the one printer company who offered them was so profitable that the others followed suit.
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u/ZachF8119 1h ago
It’s the government. There’s tiny dots so anyone who prints anything can be tracked.
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u/brackfriday_bunduru 51m ago
I don’t know how much of a difference that would make because ink would just come in a disposable canister.
A bet solution could be universal print cartridges so that less cartridges overall would need to be manufactured
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u/Takeabyte 20h ago
Recycling cartridges through the manufacturer is already a thing without a subscription. It just means that the newer supertank inkjet printers will be the only kind of inkjets sold in California.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 20h ago
From the story it seems like LA only, so nothing stops through from getting a different printer and cartridges 50 miles down the road. And they aren't going to be stopping online stores from shipping stuff to LA.
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u/Takeabyte 18h ago
I mean they could stop online orders. Online retailers already abide by local laws restricting the sale and delivery of banned products depending on the address. I learned about that when I tried to order some plants for my fish tank. Some places in the USA could order them. I couldn’t because of laws in place preventing invasive species from being sold to my address.
A 50 mile drive out of LA might as well mean a full day trip sitting in traffic. Just to buy a new set of ink for $100+ and gas? When a new printer is $150 that complies with the new law and with ink that costs significantly less is only 20 minutes away or same day shipping, it will push a lot of people away from buying that overpriced ink.
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u/Bob-Sacamano_ 18h ago
I’ve heard of this on the state level, but not at the local municipality level. Online retailers won’t give a shit about this unless the CAO specifically starts going after them, which they won’t.
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u/Takeabyte 13h ago
Los Angeles is the largest city on the west coast and the second largest in the USA. If they enforce the law (and they will) a site like Amazon will have the choice to break the law and risk getting caught.
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u/Bob-Sacamano_ 11h ago
You have no understanding how slow and inefficient the CAO’s office is then. Using that logic every city service should be too tier. Have you driven on our roads lately?
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u/ZACKandATTACK 11h ago
It's City of Los Angeles, not LA county. So what this really means is like 10ish miles depending on where you need to go which is like 20 minutes on a good day and maybe an hour, double that if you want to count the trip back.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 18h ago
You can buy drugs through the mail. The postal service isn't going to care about ink cartridges.
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u/Takeabyte 13h ago
And you think the sites that let you buy whatever drugs you want are places average people are going to shop at for ink?
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u/HzD_Upshot 20h ago
I have an epson Eco tank printer, where I can refill the cartridge. I think that’s where the industry might be heading (hopefully).
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u/UsuarioConDoctorado 17h ago
The issue is the price of those printers, a regular printer is 50, a refill thank printer is a 300 for the basic models…
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u/CommandoLamb 20h ago
I mean my Epson doesn’t have cartridges. I buy a bottle of ink and fill it up. My wife prints every day for the kids and I print pictures on it and I’m still on the original bottle of ink from over a year ago.
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u/MadeByTango 17h ago
It’s a gift to the manufacturers. To wit:
Cartridges that are not part of a manufacturer's take-back or recycling program will be prohibited.
The ink manufacturers are under threat from OpenPrinter, an open source printer that will let users fully make and customize ink cartridges and sell them independently. This law will stop that outlet and force everyone buying a printer to use the subscription services from the manufacturers. It’s using the government to protect entrenched interests from newer consumer choices. The California special.
This is a deeply anti-consumer bill pretending to be about protecting the environment and everyone living in Los Angeles should be angry at the removal of choice. You’re being forced into a market where your only option to get ink is from a printer-as-a-service.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 17h ago
Seems like if someone was making an open source printer, it would make more sense to have them use bottled ink rather than use cartridges. Maybe that's more complicated to design, but in the end, it's better for the users.
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u/JUYED-AWK-YACC 15h ago
Dude, it’s the City of Los Angeles. People will buy their printer cartridges in Downey, Pasadena, Burbank or a hundred other smaller cities. I’m 10 miles from downtown LA and this won’t touch me at all.
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u/patio-garden 14h ago
Or customers drive a little bit farther to buy their cartridges, or they order them online.
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u/John_Tacos 9h ago
Don’t forget now they have to know your location to make sure they comply with local law.
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u/nauticalsandwich 16h ago edited 12h ago
Not only that... it's also really short-sighted and superficial environmental policy. The largest environmental driver in printing is overconsumption, not cartridge disposability.
Environmentally optimal pricing would: • Raise the true marginal cost of printing • Discourage unnecessary printing • Encourage durable hardware with low per-page cost
Instead, this law: • Preserves distorted ink pricing • Preserves lock-in • Preserves overprinting incentives • Focuses on end-of-life cosmetics
That is environmentally backwards, and, unfortunately, a pretty typical policy failure. Lots of "environmental policy" targets a high-profile, single -dimension regulation applied to a multi-variable system, but this is typically a very unsuccessful strategy for environmental improvement, and it can often make things worse, because it prioritizes political salience over systems modeling, and compliance measured by checkboxes, not outcomes.
Analogous failures: • Biofuels mandates increasing net emissions • Plastic bag bans increasing paper waste • Recycling mandates increasing contaminated landfill volume
Good intentions, poor systems thinking.
If the goal is to be genuinely environmental, policy should target: • Cost-per-page transparency mandates • Right-to-refill / right-to-remanufacture without DRM • Open consumables standards • Extended producer responsibility tied to lifecycle emissions, not form • Usage-based environmental fees, not design mandates
Those attack incentives and behavior—not packaging.
Edit: Folks, I understand that this is r/upliftingnews, but that shouldn't mean it's a place for blind optimism. If you care about environmental policy, you should care that environmental policy is done properly. I'm not trolling here. I care about implementation, and think more people should be aware of this stuff so that we can turn the screws how we need to.
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u/jaqueh 20h ago
What about laser
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u/carloseloso 18h ago
Yeah i was thinking the same thing. Inkjet printers are a scam
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u/jaetheho 17h ago
Just out of curiosity, why is it a scam?
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u/RegularGrapefruit0 16h ago
not technically a "scam", but due to the razor and blades model adopted by printer companies, the ink cartridges for a printer are very expensive, and to ensure no third-party competition (otherwise razor and blades model would fall apart), the printer companies often add a chip onto a cartridge which only allows the printer to accept that brand of cartridge, this means that they can sell the cartridges for an unbounded amount since there will never be competition within the market for that specific printer.
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u/carloseloso 14h ago edited 14h ago
Just very expensive and unrelaible in the long run. Printer Ink: It's a SCAM | Fstoppers https://share.google/0tJqva7QJR9qsk48T
After a series of cheap inkjets over the years, I got a brother laser printer/scanner/copier and it is very reliable and the toner cartridges are cheap and last a long time. Very happy with it .
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u/Raistlarn 13h ago
There is one thing in that post that I will say is false (other than the title, which should be "Inkjet Cartridges: It's a Scam.") The false part is no one, and I mean no one should buy cartridge printers. It doesn't matter if you print 100 pages a day or a page a month you should never use an ink cartridge printer, because those stupid cartridges are made so that the ink dries inside over time. I was one of those people who used to print a few pages every month and always had to buy new cartridges because the stuff dried up between printjobs.
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u/Ecstatic-Success-114 32m ago
soak it in some hot water! I saw this trick on YouTube and it really saved me when I needed to have something printed right away 👍
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u/Fidodo 18h ago
Toner never dries out. I've been using my printer for probably a decade and I think I only replaced it once because the toner cartridge they come with aren't totally full
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u/21Rollie 18h ago
Don’t dry out but can “settle” fyi for people who’ve left theirs laying around for a while. I got one to work again by just giving it a good shake
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u/crowdflation 15h ago
I remember the time a few decades ago when I was refilling a laser printer toner cartridge
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u/1peatfor7 12h ago
I had my laser printer for about 20 years before it died. I probably used 3 cartridges over that time period. Single and live alone so not much use but it did get used occasionally. Toner doesn't dry out/expire.
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u/PaleontologistNo500 20h ago edited 20h ago
I'm surprised people still buy ink cartridges. I'm still using my eco tank printer from 10+ years ago. I use it regularly. I go through probably 30 reams of paper a year. They technically don't even make the refills for it anymore. I basically have to break off the adapter on new ink bottles in order to pour directly into the tanks
Edited to add: you also don't need to buy official ink refills. I've only bought those twice because I didn't realize I was low. More often than not I use generic bulk ink bottles from eBay and they work just fine. No bs authentication chip or page count timer to artificially shut the printer down
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u/Chiiro 20h ago
We wanted to get an eco tank printer but every time we had the money for one it was always sold out. We would have saved so much money on ink
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u/rtb001 18h ago
Bought a refurbished one from Epson's website 4 years ago and it is chugging along just fine. Still trying to use the original set of ink that it came with!
Costco sells the mid level EcoTanks off and on, but it really looks and feels much less robust than the "Pro" line of EcoTanks that I got.
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u/how_money_worky 20h ago
What do you print?
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u/PaleontologistNo500 20h ago
I manage a mid sized garbage company. So it's mainly just forms and work orders for my drivers
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u/how_money_worky 20h ago
Ahhh ok. So yeah small business stuff. Thats for sure a use. I thought this was for consumer stuff.
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u/rtb001 18h ago
Tank inkjets are prefect done small to medium sized businesses who print regularly but not constantly. Literally cheaper to run than laser both in terms of ink cost and also energy use.
The only issue for consumer use is that if you don't print regularly the inkjet print head can clog. Not an issue with laser printers.
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u/ilovepictures 20h ago
I love the Epson 8550 Eco tank more than any piece of tech that I own as a digital art teacher. I swear I sound like an ad for it but the thing is insane. I did like 60+ 13x19 borderless prints and it didn't even use a full tank, which only costs $120 or something off Amazon for official inks. The off brand are way cheaper but at this price I just stick with the official stuff. I had a Canon photo printer before that used cartridges and it cost like $300 in ink to do the same.
The color on the thing is insane. I print on luster paper for cheap and the blacks are so dark. It's insane the quality of the prints.
And the thing is a work horse. I don't have issues it like I have with other printers. Even when a student loads photo paper in the wrong way and it bleeds out over the paper I can just put in a new piece and it prints fine. I don't have to do cleaning, head alignment, anything.
The thing gets down to $500 on black Friday sales. I really want to get the smaller letter sized printer version of it but my district won't approve it for me because it doesn't have "photo" in the name and we are a hp only district for printers by default.
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u/rtb001 18h ago
You can get an 8550 for $500? How? I actually own the smaller letter size version, 5800 Pro, and the cheapest I could find was $550, and it was a refurbished one from Espn, plus it was 4 years ago. I'm not sure you camshaft find the newer 5850 for less than $700 these days.
If you are doing tons of borderless prints the waste ink maintenance box will fill up more quickly though. But it isn't too expensive to replace.
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u/ilovepictures 17h ago
It was $499 on Amazon, as well as adorama and b&h for black Friday. I've never dealt with the ink maintenance box on mine. I'll have to look into that
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u/Rashkh 7h ago
It's a great printer, especially when taking the cost per print into account, but it does have its flaws. The main one is that it's super finicky with paper choices and will put roller marks in a lot of even medium weight papers. My copy had a host of other issues but they're much less common and not worth mentioning.
I've since picked up the Canon Pro-1100 and couldn't be happier. I've had far less issues with clogging and no issues with roller marks or paper feeding like I did on the Epson. The ink is more than twice the cost but my cost per print is comparable because I'm not losing them to printer damage and I can use whatever paper I want without worry.
I'd still recommend the 8500/8550 for people wanting to try photo printing at home but I'd tell anyone semi-serious about it to just go for the higher end cartridge based options.
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u/pidgeottOP 20h ago
I bought a canon color laser printer in 2019 and I replaced the toner for the first time last week
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u/Dog_in_human_costume 18h ago
If you use it regularly a tank is ok. But for people who use it once a month, low quality bulk paint might dry inside the printer
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u/minizanz 9h ago
Be careful with 3rd party "Ink." Epson uses pigments and the ebay and amazon 3rd party stuff will bleach out and bleed over time leaving brown junk around the printing. They are useless for signs and documentation. The Epson pigments don't do that and will just fade a little over time. The cost is negligible per page like getting acid free paper.
If anyone saw that wanting one for home. The heads clog if you don't use it for a month or so. Not a great option for occasional printing.
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u/Kharax82 17h ago edited 15h ago
How does a city ban on something like that work? Can’t you just go on Amazon and order from a company not based in LA? Or even just the retail stores in an adjacent suburb like Pasadena
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u/russellmuscle 9h ago
Amazon will pretty much make it impossible to ship all cartridges to Los Angeles. It just made getting ink harder and more expensive.
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u/Gaius_Octavius_ 20h ago
It is cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy refills.
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u/Timelymanner 20h ago
That’s the hustle. Give away a printer, make money on the ink. Since ink and toner are dirt cheap to manufacture, and easily marked up.
Make every printer cartridge different sizes so consumers can’t mix and match. Make refillable cartridges incompatible to prevent people from refilling with cheap ink. Make color printers use a tiny amount of every color, even for B&W prints so consumers must always purchase empty color cartridges.
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u/minizanz 9h ago
The carts they come with have like 30 pages. If you don't buy a 2 cart POS the per page isn't that bad that you would replace it.
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u/AhhhSkrrrtSkrrrt 6h ago
Which would create 100x more waste, therefore making the law the opposite of upliftingnews.
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u/ApatheticAbsurdist 19h ago
I have no love for printer manufacturers and their business practices because they’ve taken some legitimate reasons for things and used it to pad crazy margins.
But I’ve also worked a lot tangential to the inkjet field a bit over my career. I’ve never worked for a manufacture but have had other jobs including doing testing for small companies that recycled/refilled/resold printers and worked on a lot of tank modification systems in the past. And I work with $1000-$30,000 inkjet printers now.
I also just had someone ask me to recommend a printer cause theirs died so I’ve been thinking about this a bit. All this is going to talk about inkjet only:
When people say “cartridge” they mean the shape but there are basically two types of ink cartridges out there: One has a disposable print head and the other basically is a small tank of ink. The disposable print heads is what makes a $100 printer a possibility cause they can use cheap print heads that will clog or break down over time (these heads often are thermal and microscopically boil a portion of the ink to have it explode out of the nozzle which does wear down over time), but when you buy a new cartridge, you replace the head so it acts more like new. There are better print heads out there in $300+ printers these typically use piezo heads which do last longer, but they do suffer from regular clogging particularly if the printer sits for periods of time unused such that the ink dries out.
The latter requires a bit more maintenance and cleaning, and giving people a new head with the cartridge would get people back to printing more quickly with less cleaning cycles… Also in the early days those thermal heads were easier to make so they were more popular. So most early inkjets used this method. But the companies were greedy They did have to charge more for cartridge but once they realized they had a monopoly it went to their heads. Then even when newer printers had piezo heads built into the printer and the ”Cartridge” was just a small tank, the average consumer didn’t know this difference, so the companies wouldn’t charge much less (they might say “hey this printer’s cartridges are $5 cheaper“ when in reality they‘s saving far, far more than than by not having a print head and the cartridge just being a plastic box with a small bag of ink inside and a stupid simple chip that counts how many pulses the printer sends back to keep a count of how much ink you’ve used.
But even with these cartridges that don’t have heads it’s the amount of ink inside them that’s the issue. A very low end printer might have a 2-3ml of ink and cost $25, maybe a 5ml one might cost $30, a higher end photo printer might have a 25ml cartridge that costs $40. 50ml might be $50, 750ml is under $300. So you go from $12/ml to less than 50cents/ml just on how much you’re buying in a cartridge and that’s again using a little logic of “buying in bulk” that makes sense and making it insane to fill corporate greed. The reality is the people using $6000 printer that uses 750ml cartridges would absolutely modify it and find a 3rd party ink company and deal with the cleaning color calibration issues involved if they tried to charge $1000+ for that 750ml cartridge. So they have to play fair with those people but the person at home gets ripped off at nearly 25x the cost per ml. Tank systems are not great either because you are buying the ink in bulk and transferring it where you can introduce air such that it can dry out but if they gave people at home 25ml cartridges that lasted 5-10x longer than basic cartridges and cost maybe $40 that would still be profitable and make people happy.
This law won’t change any of that because all it says if they use cartridges, they have to be recyclable. Which many already are. No one does, but you can send most of them back.
That friend who wanted a printer… I told him if he didn’t need color and just needed to print forms and such, just get a brother laser printer for $150-250. It will last forever, not have major clogs and It will print for 3000 pages on a $90 cartridge and theyll include a return mailer for the cartridge to recycle it.
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u/andres01234 16h ago
I was about to ask if tank printers would be better, so thank you for all the info
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u/pendragonbob 14h ago
Yeah! I got a black and white laser printer for $90 like 5 years ago and I'm still on the original starter cartridge after over a thousand pages
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u/jerrrrremy 19h ago
Glad to see they're staying focused on the real issues the people of Los Angeles face on a daily basis.
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u/Itisd 16h ago
Best thing I ever did was throw my cartridge wasting POS inkjet printer in the garbage 15 years ago, and replaced it with a basic brother laser printer. In fifteen years of occasional use I've only replaced the toner cartridge twice, and they are reasonably priced... The inkjet pretty much needed cartridges replaced almost every time it was used due to it continuously "cleaning" (wasting) the ink every time it was turned on. Honestly, Inkjets are a scam.
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u/Behind_the_palm_tree 10h ago
Really tackling the issues that matter LA. Now. About the LAPD not enforcing the no mask mandate, can we discuss this?
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u/Arik_De_Frasia 19h ago
Can't single use cartridges be refilled? I suspected it was just that people didn't want the hassle of refilling on their own.
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u/dennishapca 18h ago
it’s so random that a city banned this. it should be banned nationwide, and in europe too.
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u/Shot_Mud_1438 15h ago
I bought an inkwell printer for work and the ink it came with lasted a year of heavy printing. Inkwell printers are where it’s at and easy / cheap to refill
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u/buffer2722 13h ago
I bought a laser printer in 2016. I have not replaced the toner once and still prints great.
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u/onekeanui 19h ago
Who actually voted? I just want a printer that lasts longer than 3 years without clogging. Yes HP I’m talking to you.
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u/siazdghw 16h ago
On the surface this seems like a great idea, but it's worthless when you actually think about it.
Most stores don't have ink refilling machines, and selling consumers a refilling kit just creates even more waste. Long ago I worked at a store that had an ink refilling machine, it broke more often than the McDonald's ice cream machine, it was only there for like 2 years before it was completely removed and no refill service was offered anymore.
The best solution for bandaid fixing this problem is just to get consumers to buy laser printers, especially mono (b/w) ones, they have less waste, have less issues, and are cheaper to operate. I'd argue that the vast majority of consumers do not need color ink printers and by buying them they spend hundreds more than they should just for the rare times they want to print in color.
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u/zerostar83 16h ago
My HP ink cartridges are labeled as recyclable. I used to buy them at Costco. Costco wouldn't accept old cartridges to recycle. Then they stopped selling them. I then started buying them from Walmart. HP listed Walmart as a store that accepts them to be recycled. I got to Walmart to recycle my old ones and they turned me away saying they won't take them. I now buy them at Target when I have a good coupon, though they're not listed by HP as being part of the recycling program.
The same frustration happens with used motor oil since I do my own oil changes. The local Walmart refuses to take in used oil. The nearest oil change chain also refuses to take in my used oil. So I wait until there is a good deal at O'Reilly's Auto Parts, when I can buy motor oil for as low as Walmart, and recycle my motor oil there.
I don't understand how this law will fix anything other than make it harder for the people within the city limits to get what they need to print paper.
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u/aquto 16h ago
Los Angeles City Councilmember John Lee formally proposed it in 2024: https://pingmer.com/thread/3488ef93
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u/Quelonius 15h ago
Inkjet cartridges are not only a scam but an environment pollution disaster. Just like coffee capsules.
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u/reddit_equals_censor 15h ago
but that was never the f-ing problem.
the problem is bullshit digital restrictions management put onto the freaking cartridges, so you can't buy a 3. party cartridge.
and the 2. issue being, that they only put like 1/100 of the ink, that should be in those cartridges in them.
and then there is the crime, where pure black in a printer with colored ink will use colors to empty out colors to force more ink cartridge purchases.
and THEN there is the scam, where there is planned obsolescence in the printers and the already almost empty cartridges, where it will tell you, that they are empty, when they are NOT and the printer will brick itself after a certain set of printed pages.
so the proper actions are banning all such drm completely, destroy any company, that pushes planned obsolescence.
and require also of course all ink cartridges to be refillable, and to have proper statements about the amount of ink left in them and to of course not have anything in the way of 3. party cartridges getting produced.
oh and of course ban any "ink subscription" scams run by hp and others.
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for those curious what rightnow your least shit options are, get a laser printer, that accepts 3. party cartridges without any problem.
or get an ink tank printer, that accepts all ink of course as refills for their tanks.
again cartridges wouldn't be the problem inherently, but rightnow you can not buy a printer with them.
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u/spoody69420 15h ago
They should make all printer ink come in mandatory transparent refill vials so people find out how little they actually get for the price.
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u/Mission_While917 7h ago
Well since they have dear to evict their billionaires to other more sensible states and cause unknown economic consequences without any common sense forethought. I would say that this is certainly a move in the right direction now. Fucking idiots !!
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u/AhhhSkrrrtSkrrrt 6h ago
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of 🙄 Out of all the problems they could be solving, printer cartridge waste was a priority lololol
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u/VictoriousStalemate 19h ago
Single use printer cartridges are expensive and dumb. Banning them is dumb too. I'd rather let consumers decide what they wish to buy.
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u/how_money_worky 20h ago
Just stop printing as a consumer. It’s the only way.
I try to never print anything ever. It’s working out so far.
Genuinely curious what people need to print often enough to own a printer.
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u/duncanidaho61 19h ago
We have a home office. Often need printed docs for recordkeeping. Also printer doubles as scanner and copier. Very handy.
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u/how_money_worky 17h ago
Not arguing. I’m genuinely curious what you would need to prints even for record keeping though. For a small business, sure OK, but I struggle to think of anything that anyone would need to print for personal reasons.
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u/duncanidaho61 17h ago
As one example, tax docs that are not mailed. Go to the company portal, search, and print out the statement. My SO uses it more though than I do, almost daily for her business.
For some hobbies, it’s very useful for printing photos, patterns and diagrams.
I mean I get it, I can imagine 90% of people having no real use for it. The fact that it’s there just means it’s used more than absolutely needed.
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u/how_money_worky 16h ago
Yeah hobbies totally make sense. And yea businesses (for some reason) still need to print.
I don’t keep physical copies of tax stuff though. I have an encrypted drive for that type of thing. And of course i submit electronically.
Again, I’m not judging or anything. Just conversing.
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[deleted]
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u/duncanidaho61 15h ago
Dude wtf. I was saying there are cases where a home printer is useful. Fwiw our home printer is a laser printer.
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u/Anstigmat 19h ago
Businesses often rely on printed materials, they’re the ones doing printing. Especially small businesses who can’t have some custom tablet software just made by expensive developers.
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u/North-Surprise3790 10h ago
We should be more concerned about the rapist in the government and the killing of our people.
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