Environment: don’t throw away your ink cartridge, refill it

You may have seen them in the aisles of your store. Installed in more than 400 points of sale in France — at Auchan, Boulanger, Bureau Vallée, Carrefour, Cora, etc. — these machines, called Ink Bars, allow you to refill your printer cartridges. The principle is simple: “The customer comes with an empty one to have it filled. We make a small hole, inject ink, and plug it back in. And that’s it. In total, for a model with a print head — the most common — it takes seven to eight minutes,” explains Lilian Gamé, head of Bureau Vallée in Grasse (Alpes-Maritimes), who was the brand’s first franchisee to install this type of machine two years ago. Today, around ten points of sale in the network have one, the goal is to deploy it in around fifty stores by the end of 2025.