How to earn Avios buying and recycling ink cartridges with Tesco

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An interesting way to earn a large quantity of Tesco Clubcard points, to transfer to Avios or Virgin Flying Club, is to use Tesco to recycle inkjet cartridges. Via its partner, The Recycling Factory, Tesco will give 50-100 Clubcard points (120-240 Avios, 125-250 Virgin miles) for many popular cartridges.

It is a simple structure – see if the cartridges you use qualify for recycling and then pick up a pre-paid envelope in your local Tesco or request one online.

If you do this with the old cartridges from your home printer, you will be able to pick up a few hundred points per year. However, it is possible to scale this up if you want to make the effort.

If you search on ebay for ‘empty ink cartridges’ (click here to do the search automatically) you will see plenty of people selling. Since early 2012, Tesco now allows you to recycle up to 100 cartridges per household (not per Clubcard) each year.

It is worth mentioning at this point that buying cartridges on ebay is not as lucrative as it was. In February 2013, Tesco revised the list of qualifying cartridges. Some of the most popular ones to buy, eg HP 364’s, dropped from 100 points to 50 points. You will now need to be a bit savvier in tracking down cartridges which qualify for the full 100 points.

You need to do the maths carefully to make this work. Not all cartridges you send can be recycled – some will be damaged, even if you can’t see it from the outside, and some will get damaged in transit. You need to build in at least 10% – 20% wastage. Any cartridges marked SETUP or INTRO (the free ones you get with a new printer which only hold a small amount of ink) are also not accepted.

If I was doing this (which, for clarity, I’m not) I would be looking to pay no more than 90p per ‘100 point’ cartridge. That would be 99p with a 10% failure rate, for 240 Avios, so around 0.4p per Avios. I always aim to get at least 0.75p of value per Avios, so I would just about be doubling my money – but there is of course quite a bit of effort involved, and there is a risk of a higher failure rate.

If there was another Tesco-to-Avios ’30% conversion bonus’, of course, then I would be paying a lot less per Avios. You can’t guarantee that another bonus will come along, though.

Small quantities of cartridges can be sent in using the free postage bags that you can request online. For larger quantities, request a bag to get the address and then send in a parcel (the same box you receive from your ebay seller!).

This is not something to jump into without giving it some thought. You need to research ebay pricing, for a start. However, the time / effort / Avios trade off may be worth it for some.