Last week, I was preparing to write about things we can reuse in the office when our color printer died unexpectedly. My office was nearly closed, but we depend on a working printer and found ourselves in a jam. My boss gave me $300 cash to pick up a new one in the morning before work, and I went home to research printers and prices. I went to Staples to check out the HP printers. Our dead printer was an older model, the OfficeJet Pro 7590, and handled a heavy-duty workload. My choices for a new printer were to downgrade to the 6500 or upgrade to the 8500. The 6500 is rated for 7,000 pages a month, but it looks like a home printer with a small paper tray, which wouldn’t really work for our needs. The 8500, on the other hand, is a solid machine designed for office use, and it’s touted by HP and Staples as “carbon-neutral printing” with several eco-advantages, including standard double-sided printing and an Energy Star rating for energy efficiency. But the price was $399 before an instant $100 rebate, which means $299 before tax. I didn’t have enough money to get the better model. This isn’t a printer review article — it’s about reusing and recycling office products. Here’s how I was able to upgrade to the OfficeJet Pro 8500 and still come in under my $300 budget: Staples and HP are running an incentive for customers who have old printers to recycle. The old printers don’t need to be working. Bring an old printer to Staples and they’ll give you an instant $50 discount on the purchase of a new energy-efficient printer. After the $100 instant rebate and the $50 recycling credit, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 cost only $249 plus tax. I returned to work on time with a new printer and some change, coming in under budget and still managing to upgrade our hardware. When the time comes for a new printer, now you can save money while upgrading to a new energy-efficient model. That’s a win-win.