All inkjet printers have to clean and purge the heads to keep them
from clogging and to maintain the printing quality.
That ink has to go somewhere, and all the printers of all brands have a
waste ink storage system of some type. Some use a container or area
within the printer body, most use "diapers" which absorb it, all can
leak if the printer is positioned incorrectly or they overflow.
In my opinion, the designs used are flawed. Laser printers either
have a bottle or hopper of some type that stores the waste toner which
is removed from the drum after each page is printed. This can be
either emptied, replaced, or comes out with the toner cartridge (it's
a space within the cartridge which is filled).
In one Epson printer (the PictureMate), the waste ink is pumped into a
special chamber in the ink cartridge, but to my knowledge, that's the
only inkjet doing that. Most inkjet companies seem to think that
people will toss the printer before the waste ink area gets filled, or
they can pay for a service call when it does do so.
I think this is totally the wrong approach. The cost of a new design
may add slightly to the cost the printer, but it could be designed so
the ink was stored in a bottle with a no spill top, which was
accessible to the user and could be replaced or emptied. I am now
encouraging people to retrofit their printers to bring the waste ink
outside of the printer and into some type of container. In general,
the process isn't that complex, but every printer is different and it
may involve taking the printer apart so I can't provide instructions,
but people may wish to pursue it with their model and see if someone
has come up with the fix for it on the web somewhere.
I am not naive enough not to recognize one of the reasons the
manufacturer don't redesign, besides wishing to reduce the life span
of their printers, so you have to buy a new one, is because no
manufacturer wants the end user to realize how much of that $1,000 a
liter (not a documented number, so please don't ask me for references)
ink is ending up in the diapers of the printer and ultimately into the
garbage.
To me, this is one of those situations that is truly without ANY
ethical base.
1) The manufacturer's charge a fortune for the ink
2) The design of the heads make it necessary to waste a lot of that
ink to keep the printer working
3) The waste ink can limit the life of the printer, as the printer may
stop working once a certain amount of ink is dumped into the waste
system, and the cost of renewing these is often too high to justify
having it done
4) There is no safe method of disposing of the ink because it becomes
integral to the printer, so if you dump the printer, the waste ink
goes with it. Also, since there is no way to store the waste ink as a
separate entity, no system has been implemented to allow for proper
disposal of the inks. Some of the inks have components (especially
the pigments) which can be considered environmentally hazardous.
Currently when the whole printer can end up in the landfill, filled
with waste ink which leaks out of it.