Re: Can't help feeling it's more a bottom line thing than a green thing...
"An OEM cartridge for my Brother HL-1210W costs £36 and a pattern one, which seems to work just as well, costs £9. Both last about 1,500 pages of A4, which is 2.4p or 0.6p per page."
Cost per page for lasers is a moving target though. Depends on how often you use it. Cost per page as a function purely of the toner, when comparing with inkjet makes it seem much cheaper. While still cheaper, you also need to take into account the drum/developer unit if separate from the toner unit and also the fuser unit. Likewise, the use case. Lasers can't hold a candle to inkjets when it comes to photo quality printing.
I've got an old Epson photo printer that's almost certainly dried out now, but was very good with an external tank mod for much, much cheaper bottle fed bulk ink. The second-hand colour laser went to the tip when the cost and time of replacing the transfer belt[*] got to be more then the printer was worth, and I'm quite happy with the new mono laser, my primary wishes being an Ethernet port and duplex. My use case has changed over the years :-)
* Actually economic on the non-duplex version, but my duplex model was a royal pain in the arse to change the transfer belt and nearly twice the price! Part of my job includes printer repairs, and *I* wasn't prepared to spend that amount of time money on it, which tells you something about the shitty design of that printer and probably why I got it for next to nothing in the first place. Still, it did give a few years of sterling service :-)