Education | Brother, Canon, Hewlett Packard, and Konica Minolta Ring of Recycling Recaps

Five bloody (inky?) battles have now been fought in the Ring of Recycling, and now it’s time to take a look at the carnage and see which companies are still in the competition. We’ll now continue with a quick recap of the events of these matches.

Match 1: Brother versus Canon. Brother blew Canon out of the ring, allowing Brother to print labels from its website without asking for any information or placing any limitations on which of its products it accepts back, while Canon only accepted back certain items, threatened customers who went against its policies with fees, and asked for every kind of information except the name of the customer’s firstborn. No contest. Brother was the clear winner.

Match 2: Hewlett Packard vs. Konica Minolta. In what initially seemed like a close contest, with both companies requiring a fair amount of contact information, Hewlett Packard pulled steadily ahead. By not automatically opting its customers into its marketing emails, not asking for the serial number of the product, and generally not being a nuisance, Hewlett Packard made recycling toner cartridges more pleasant and easier. But the real death blow came when Konica Minolta obliged its customer’s to accept terms and conditions that authorized it with the right to recover costs for shipping “unauthorized items,” which included “packaging Material including cartons, bubble wrap etc…,” “multiple items returned in a non-Clean Planet recycling box,” and my favorite, improperly wrapped printer cartridges. Hewlett Packard won the day.