Recycled Ink Cartridges Get New Life as Lamps

February 4th, 2010 by: Technabob

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If you regularly use an inkjet printer, you can certainly try and recycle your cartridges by refilling them with more ink. But get real – most of the time, your empties just end up in the dumpster. Not so with these clever lighting fixtures made from the discarded shells of EPSON inkjet cartridges.

These lighting fixtures are first scrubbed of ink, then drilled, dremel-ed out and assembled into composite hanging lamps or individual ink cart lamps.

They’re available as single lamps ($30 USD), 4-cartridge box pendants ($45) or as an 8-cartridge chandelier ($150). Colors include matte black, cyan, light-cyan, magenta, light-magenta, yellow, light-black, and light-light-black depending on your mood. Personally, I’m always running out of magenta. I’m not quite sure what that says about me.

Now I don’t know what’s going in Durham, North Carolina, but I found variants of these lamps from two different Durham-based Etsy shops – LowellAndLouise and boxlightbox, both of whom are selling what look like the same ink cartridge lamps. I don’t know if these are the same guys, had the same idea at the same exact time, or if somebody just swiped somebody else’s idea. Whatever the case, I think they look cool.

[via The Design Town]