Los Angeles has spent years tightening rules around single-use plastics, from shopping bags to takeaway containers, and now it has set its sights on a new environmental enemy, with the city council announcing plans to advance a ban on certain single-use printer cartridges.
What’s being targeted isn’t printing itself, or even cartridges as a category. The focus is on cartridges that can’t be refilled, remanufactured, reused, or recovered through a take-back program – effectively products designed to be thrown away once they’re empty and no longer of use.
That distinction is important because the printer market is messy by design. Original cartridges, third-party compatibles, clones, and counterfeits all coexist, often sold side by side – but Los Angeles is trying to regulate outcomes rather than brands, which makes the intent clearer, even if enforcement will be much, much harder.
Price is what buyers care about
The environmental argument is a familiar one. Printer cartridges mix plastics, metals, and chemical residues that don’t belong in curbside recycling.
While hazardous waste programs exist, city officials have said many cartridges still end up in landfills where they can take hundreds of years to break down.
When plans for the ban were first announced in 2024, LA Councilmember John Lee said, “It is incumbent upon the City of Los Angeles to continue paving the way forward on environmental issues. As the representative of the community in which the Sunshine Canyon Landfill is located, I fully recognize the importance of minimizing the impact of waste on our neighborhoods. Banning aftermarket clone cartridges is a simple way to keep building on our environmental achievements and bring attention to an issue that has gone unaddressed for too long.ˮ
Whether the ban changes anything in practice really depends on how people actually buy printers. Cost to consumers is rarely a factor in environmental debates, but printer buyers are usually focused on shelf price rather than sustainability, even though ink and toner costs often prove to be way more expensive than the printer itself over the device’s lifetime.
Cartridge pricing can often be very misleading as we reported a while ago, which helps explain why single-use designs persist. A $20 cartridge might only contain a few milliliters of ink, driving up the real cost per page, while larger cartridges or bottled ink systems often look expensive upfront but work out cheaper over months or years.
That gap between upfront price and long-term cost helps explain why cartridge-based printers remain popular.
Cheap hardware paired with inexpensive-looking cartridges still sells well, especially for home users and students who don’t print heavily.
At the same time, refillable tank printers have moved firmly into the mainstream. They appeal to users frustrated by cartridge replacements and rising ink costs, while also reducing plastic waste per page.
From a policy perspective, they neatly sidestep the single-use cartridge problem altogether.
Subscription ink services complicate things further. They promise convenience and built-in recycling, but still rely on cartridges moving through homes at scale. Whether those programs qualify as genuine recovery pathways under Los Angeles’ proposed rules remains a grey area.
Ownership trends suggest printing isn’t disappearing as quickly as some assume. Surveys conducted across thousands of users show that while a growing share of people no longer own a printer, millions still rely on them for schoolwork, remote jobs, and small business tasks.
Those same surveys point to strong brand concentration. HP dominates household printer ownership, while Japanese brands like Canon, Epson, and Brother collectively account for a similar share. Smaller brands occupy niche roles but remain largely invisible to mainstream buyers.
Our cartridge pricing analysis found Canon and Epson tend to focus on lower cost per liter options, particularly with bottled ink, while HP spans everything from affordable to extremely expensive ink depending on the cartridge.
If you’re thinking of buying a new printer for home or work, there are a lot of factors to consider, which is why we previously did a deep dive into which printers are cheapest to run.
Catalonia ban
From Los Angeles’ perspective, this isn’t just about waste volumes. Single-use cartridges also undermine remanufacturing, an industry built around products designed to survive multiple lives. Clone cartridges that can’t be reused break that loop entirely.
LA isn’t the only place that sees a problem with ink cartridges. In 2024, inspired by previous similar measures in the Balearic Islands, Catalonia in northeastern Spain folded a cartridge ban into a broader waste law built around reuse and circular design, treating printing as part of a wider materials problem rather than a special case.
Still, the Los Angeles plan comes with unanswered questions. The ban applies within city limits, so online enforcement will be tricky, and definitions around reuse could change as technology does. Consumers can also choose to ignore the regulations and buy elsewhere, limiting its impact.
What Los Angeles is really testing is whether environmental rules can push the market faster than consumer habits alone. Ink has always been expensive, wasteful, and easy to ignore. The city has decided that’s no longer acceptable, even if the outcome of its plans remains to be seen.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/7BtL8NpovxzjBEETwdwFjY-2560-80.jpeg
Source link
waynewilliams@onmail.com (Wayne Williams)
