re: reduce - reuse - recycle

The anti-refill chips aren't intended to prevent recycling - although in the case of HP-style ink cartridges there is a *TINY* bit of merit in their use - their intent is to keep *YOU* from recycling.

HP cartridges embed the print head itself in the "disposable" cartridge. The technology used in the head uses a micro-boiler to vaporize a tiny bit of ink and use this to "spit" a micro-droplet onto the paper. Over time, the "boiler" becomes clogged and needs to be replaced.

This is also where ink formulation becomes critical: the ink is similar to the fuel-oil mix in a 2-stroke gasoline engine. It must carry pigment, boil at a specific heat input, remain at a specific viscosity over a wide temperature range, be a solvent to keep the "boiler" clean and lubricated, and fulfill the toxicity and environmental requirements of a consumer product. This was the original reason that HP and others did not want 3rd party refillers involved: the ink technology was usually the first thing that was scrapped by unscrupulous refillers, causing rapid failure of the print head mechanism. HP "solved" the problem by putting "disposable" print heads in each cartridge - thus insuring that a new print head would be used each time the cartridge was replaced, eliminating the maintenance problem. (Indeed, in some of the high-end "All-In-One" products, the print head and ink cartridge are actually two seperate components: you replace the ink cartridges 3-4 times before replacing the MUCH more expensive print heads. However, these are engineered to be long-life heads...probably through some small decreace in viscosity and a bit more solvent in the ink mix, as the physics of the head design dictates the parameters for forming the droplet that hits the paper.)

Other manufacturers did not follow this simple design, and built a non-replaceable print head into the printer. This requires a more sophisticated ink in order to keep the mechanism from failing for a "reasonable" printer life expectancy.

I "learned" all of this the "hard way" - I did an internship with a large computer company back in the 1970's in the printer development lab and researched pneumatic "hammer" and ink jet operation in line-printer environments. OOPS - my age is showing again...

The "unfair" part of this equation is the busiess model that has been adopted with regard to the disposables, not the fact that print heads need to be replaced. While ink may be a very expensive component to develop, the cost becomes trivial when you start making tankers full of it. And, due to the very short duty cycles of consumer printers (yes, SHORT duty cycles), the ink and head designs *SHOULD* be useful for at least 2 or 3 refills before failure of nozzles finally occurs.

The "politically correct" solution for a manufacturer would be to provide ink in 2-3 times larger cartridges at about the same price as the small ones today, and provide a post-paid recycle pack with each new cartridge to return the spent cartridge for proper recycle and disposal. This would allow use up to head failure and make it trivial to return the cartridge for proper disposal.