Recycling

Yesterday I replaced the toner cartridges on my Brother laser printer. When I first opened the box for each cartrige I saw Brother's notice not to dump the used toners in landfill but to recycle them. My initial reaction was something like "easy to say, but what a hassle". But then I was pleasantly surprised to find a pre-paid postage sticker to send the used cartridges back to Brother (using the boxes from the new cartridges). I told this to the kids and described it as "putting your money where your mouth is". Brother shows real committment by spending money to help its customers recycle the cartridges. Of course, this is probably a smart investment as it should generate goodwill from customers (it sure did for me). We discussed a few other examples of following words with actions...

I mentioned to the kids that I would write about it in my blog, which might help the Brother brand - given than I have such a large audience (not). The kids wanted to know if Brother read all their customers' blogs. I explained that there are services that track online mentions of brands, althought with a brand such as Brother, they probably get lots of false positives.

[Later in the day my friend Joe suggested that Brother might reuse the cartridges, so that they might actually be saving money! Maybe, but they are still making it really easy for their customers to recycle...]