What do you do with your empty ink cartridges? With the ease of printing at home, the number of these cartridges found in dump sites and trash cans has risen sharply. The plastic does not easily degrade, and can lead to serious environmental issues.

Many computer/accessory stores have started recycling programs to reuse and refurbish the cartridges. If you don't return them to various retail stores for recycling, the second best thing you can do is "upcycle" or re-purpose thesm. Upcycling is "the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value." It has become a popular sustainable hobby in the past several years, gaining much gusto in the online forums and communities.

Here at Inkfarm.com, you may guess that we have quite a lot of empty or nearly empty ink cartridges laying around. In effort to clean out the backroom that houses all of them (and feed my crafty personality), I'm going to start upcycling the usable cartridges!

However, I can only think of so many projects to do with ink cartridges. Please leave your suggestions and ideas so I can bring them into reality. They can be as small as ink cartridge stamps or as large as a water-craft - let your imagination go wild and I'll try to accommodate all of them.

Here are a few examples of some upcycling projects already out on the web:

LOVE Stamps The Starship Enterprise Ink Cartridge Chandelier Let's get crafty!