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Ink cartridges are one of those inanimate objects that do a lot but yet never seem to get any interest or recognition. They are pretty advanced technology, when you decide you wish to print something from your computer you sit back, click the print button and allow your printer and ink cartridges to get to work. But do you actually know how any of this works? How ink cartridges came to be and how you can print away guilt-free with recyclable cartridges? So your printer is clicking away, making noises and your print out slides out. How does any of this work? Firstly, the clever printer creates your work by spraying the paper entirely with thousands of tiny ink drops. With up to thousands drops being sprayed out a nozzle per second by the ink cartridge, pretty impressive stuff for something that looks like a small plastic box. An average cartridge has between three hundred and six hundred of these nozzles! The droplets of ink that land on your page are pretty tiny, and by tiny we are talking microscopic. They are around 50-60 microns in diameter, which is thinner than a hair on your head. If that wasn't impressive enough, all these droplets can be mixed together to create any colour you can imagine. Picasso would have had a field day! All cartridges print differently, using static electricity and heat to print out pages but inkjet cartridges tend to use liquid ink. Ink is also sprayed differently too, some use printers use an electric current to heat up a tiny piece of metal within the cartridge. As this heats up this creates a bubble that begins to push ink out of its nozzles and onto your paper. Another method to get that ink squirted out, is called the piezoelectric method and it uses piezo crystals within the cartridge (who knew they kept crystals in there?!) that vibrate through an electric current and as the crystals get bigger they force out the ink. So by the time we're at this point, the printer's motor has to pause, but just for a fraction of a second! And allow the thousands of droplets to get sprayed from your little hero-the ink cartridge. The ink cartridge then moves and sprays again and so on, until you have your printed piece. Recycling ink cartridges is important-seeing that there are cheap ink cartridges that can be purchased easily from a lot of retailers. And many people are purchasing, over 1 Billion are being used worldwide and this year, sales are expected to double to 2 Billion per year. That is a lot of ink! The easiest way in which recycle your cheap ink cartridges is to either take them to your local recycling centre (that's the least you can do after what your cartridge will have done for you!) or to send them to companies that specialise in the recycling of brand and cheap ink cartridges. These lovely companies will allow you do this and raise cash for schools and other fund raisers. So, the next time you print out something, remember the work your little ink cartridge has done and although you thought it was just a cheap ink cartridge, how complex it really is!
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