So a guy who worked for Teledyne and other multibillion-dollar companies and a guy who worked for the Bank of China decide to team up and start a "green" business in Merced.
Meet Dan Caris, chief operations officer, and Eric Moore, vice president of corporate and government sales for the 2-year-old Mr. Ink Pro.
Like other famous garage inventors -- Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard, and Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who founded Apple -- the two top officers of Mr. Ink Pro work out of a garage in a big house off M Street near the UC Merced campus.
Their dream may not be quite as lofty as reshaping the way the world processed and accessed information with hardware and software, but it's a dream deeply felt by both. They're in the business of recycling ink cartridges. They pick up your cartridge, take it back to their garage, put in new versions of the 50 or so working parts in an ink printer and deliver it back to your office ready to print.
And they say they do it for about half the price of anybody else, let alone the cost of a new cartridge.
At least as important to them, they do it with almost nothing from their shop winding up in a landfill. They try to reuse everything -- from plastic gears to aluminum rods to integrated circuits. Even the toner itself eventually will wind up in asphalt patches.
Mr. Ink Pro started in Southern California as a family business -- Mr. Ink. While Mr. Ink thrives under the management of Caris' two sons, Mr. Ink Pro serves Merced County and beyond.
The business mind-set on their website, www.mrinkpro.com, sounds almost corny -- except the words reflect the firm intent of both men to do good while doing well:
"We do what we do because it's fun. The funnest part is saving our clients money in an area where traditionally the consumer has been helpless. We help you turn the tide of having to pay excessive prices in order to do the minimum of business.
"Things are hard enough today for everyone. For big operations, for once, wouldn't it for be nice to know that simply working smarter with a local business could allow you to keep more people working in your own work space?"
In short, the firm replaces all the worn-out internal parts of a cartridge, including gears, springs, pins, rollers, blades, special electro-optical gizmos and their coatings, magnetic and physical seals and rollers. In some models, electronic integrated circuits must be swapped out.
This approach has earned Mr. Ink Pro a spot in the Greater Merced Chamber of Commerce's REACON (recycling energy air conservation) program "to promote environmental stewardship solutions and address environmental and economic development issues."
Caris was a senior manufacturing engineer for Teledyne and several other major corporations, ranging from the Bay Area to Colorado. He wound up at a machine shop in Catheys Valley with other engineers before the recession turned their employer belly-up. He wanted to stay in the area, so after his sons launched their startup in Riverside County, he decided to do the same here.
Moore, who grew up in Kansas City, studied Chinese in high school. After college he wound up in post-Maoist China. That nation was just embarking on its rapid path to industrialization, and a niche was found for a bright young American in China's national bank. He and his wife moved to the Bay Area and, after deciding they wanted a slower pace, moved to Merced where she works for the university.
Paradoxically, one of their company's selling points is that most ink cartridges are sent to China for repair and refilling, then returned to American retailers. "Why should you be subject to a 15,000-mile-long supply chain?" Moore asked.
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