Alphasoft Ltd’s Sales and Marketing Manager Victoria Wheaton.  Photo by Steven Knipp

Twenty years ago many of the world’s most celebrated business gurus assured us with absolute certainty that in the future we would all be working in pristine, completely paper-less offices. They told us that our desks would be neat and tidy, devoid of any paper clutter whatsoever because all our business information and means of communication would be appearing on computer screens.

Yet take a quick glance around any office anywhere in the world today and you’ll immediately find that all of those fantastic forecasts failed to come true. In fact, quite the reverse is the case: these days we all seem to be afloat in an ever expanding, ever spreading ocean of office paper.

The good news about this, is that paper itself is a completely organic product and so when properly deposed of in a landfill, will, within a few months or even a few weeks, entirely decompose without harming the environment in any way.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the countless thousands of used ink toner cartridges which we all use every day. Quite the opposite. These specially designed containers consist of 40 percent metal, and 40 percent plastic, with added bits of foam, paper, rubber and toner. And it can take as much as 1,000 years for the plastics in these cartridges to completely decay and dissolve, thereby filling ugly and ever expanding landfills, both on this island and all across the world.

However, a locally based software company, Alphasoft Ltd, has decided to do something to reduce that needless waste and the ecological damage it causes by launching a simple and easy programme that can recycle old HP toner cartridges so they’ll have no ill impact on the Cayman environment.

It works like this: Instead of merely tossing out your used HP Laser Toner cartridges, you just store them (no need to save the original boxes) until your store of cartridges is at capacity. Then just email recycling@alphasoft.com.ky and Alphasoft will do the rest. Picking the spent cartridges up, loading them into a container in Cayman and then freighting them to Miami.

Alphasoft’s sales and marketing manager Victoria Wheaton told the Cayman Net News:

“This is a completely non-profit project for us, and none of these old cartridges are being re-filled. Our Platinum Partner HP crushes them all up and then the materials can be recycled to be used for other things.”

Alphasoft will collect your spent HP cartridges even if you’re not a client. Although currently only HP Laser Toner cartridges can be used for the programme, in future the company hopes to include regular ink cartridges as well.

The response from Alphasoft’s clients and customers has been wholly supportive, according to Ms Wheaton. “All of our customers are thrilled with the concept. They’ve told us that it’s about time that someone came up with an idea like this,” she said.

Aside from their pro-active environmental stance, the company which has been in business for more than 23 years, and sells over a thousand computers per year, also takes pride in the fact that many of its staff have been with the firm for ten years.