WHEN DON MacKinnon started recycling printer ribbons 15 years ago, he didn’t get into it to save the planet. He saw it as an opportunity to make a buck.

"I saw niche," said the president of Ribbons Recycled Inc. "People were throwing away mountains of printer ribbon and it occurred to me there might be a way to re-ink and reuse them. It was all about the cost factor. The emphasis on the environment came later."

The early experiments with re-inking the ribbon fabric began in the bathroom of his Dartmouth home. It took a while to figure out how to do it efficiently with oil-based inks, but he said like any good entrepreneur, he never gave up.

Once he had perfected the technique he began collecting the used ribbon from businesses and reselling customers refurbished units at a discounted rate. As the business grew he hired staff to carry out the refurbishing and remanufacturing.

When ribbon technology gave way to ink-jet cartridges, Mr. MacKinnon developed a way to reuse those. And now as ink-jet cartridges are making way for their laser printer cousins, they too are being recycled.

But Mr. MacKinnon is quiet about the company’s success. He grudgingly shows off his spacious 9,000-square-foot Dartmouth warehouse where 10 employees refurbish and then test more than 5,000 cartridges a month...

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