Free Printer Recycling Service in San Diego

Free Printer Recycling Pickup in San Diego

Recycle your old printers for free at Dream Electronic Recycling. We accept inkjet and laser printers, all-in-one machines, office copiers, scanners, plotters, label printers, receipt printers, and more, regardless of brand, age, or condition.

Drop off your printers at any of our six San Diego County locations, whichever is closest to you, or schedule a free pickup if you have five or more computing devices.

Because we are an R2v3-certified facility registered with CalRecycle (CEWID #127772), we handle printer waste responsibly. Call (619) 889-1305 or fill out the form to get started.

General Contact form

Printers and Printing Equipment We Accept in San Diego

Dream E-Waste accepts a wide range of printers, copiers, scanners, and related printing equipment for recycling, regardless of brand, age, or working condition. Most printers are accepted free of charge, while certain equipment and loose ink or toner cartridges may have separate fees.

Home and Office Printers

Inkjet printers, color and monochrome laser printers, all-in-one print/scan/copy/fax units, photo and dye-sublimation printers, portable and mobile printers, dot matrix and impact printers, and any desktop printer regardless of age or working condition.

Copiers and Multifunction Printers

Floor-standing and desktop copiers, office MFPs, departmental networked printers and production print units. These contain hard drives, so see the data section above. For this reason, we remove and destroy storage as standard.

Copiers count as office equipment, so email us photos first and bring them to a Recycling Center rather than a drop-off site.

Specialty, Commercial and Large-Format Printers

Wide-format and poster printers, plotters and CAD/engineering plotters, banner printers, digital presses and production printers, label and barcode printers, thermal and receipt printers, POS printers, 3D printers (FDM, FFF and resin), drum printers and chain printers.

However, large-format and floor-standing equipment is a Recycling Center job. Email photos first and call before you try to move it.

Scanners, Typewriters and Related Equipment

We also take flatbed and document scanners, sheet-fed and photo scanners, typewriters (electric and manual), fax machines, print servers, external print spoolers, USB and network print adapters, paper trays and finishers, duplexers, and printer cables and power supplies.

Ink and Toner Cartridges

Ink and toner cartridges are $2 each, accepted at our Recycling Centers.

If you can, leave cartridges inside the printer. If the cartridge is still in the machine when you bring it in, there’s nothing extra to pay, the per-cartridge price applies to loose cartridges dropped off on their own. That’s also the cheapest route for most people, and it saves you handling toner.

If you do have loose cartridges and would rather not pay, the manufacturer mail-back programs from HP, Canon, Epson and Brother are free, and Staples and Office Depot accept them in store, often with rewards credit.

However, loose or spilled toner powder is not accepted. That’s because it’s a fine particulate that’s a respiratory irritant and a combustible dust hazard in quantity, and it needs different handling from sealed cartridges. If a cartridge has split, seal it in a bag, don’t vacuum the spill with a household vacuum, and call (619) 889-1305 before travelling.

Printer Brands We Accept in San Diego

We take every printer brand, because the brand genuinely doesn't matter.

HP Canon Epson Samsung Brother Xerox Ricoh Konica Minolta Sharp Kyocera Lexmark Dell Samsung Toshiba Panasonic OKI Zebra Dymo Bambu Lab Prusa

Printer Items and Materials We Cannot Accept

We cannot accept the following items due to safety concerns, specialized handling requirements, or because they fall outside our electronics recycling services.

Not accepted

Why / what to do instead

Loose or spilled toner powderLoose or spilled toner powder

Combustible dust and respiratory hazard, so it needs specialized handling

Leaking printers

Anything leaking ink, toner or fluid

Loose damaged or swollen lithium-ion batteries

From portable printers. A battery inside a device is fine, but it's loose damaged cells we can't take.

Industrial and production printing machinery

Offset presses, screen-printing rigs and similar, since these fall outside the e-waste stream

Non-electronic printing equipment

Such as manual presses, letterpress equipment, mechanical typesetting

Contaminated equipment

Biological, chemical or unknown contamination

Including printers containing exposed hazardous substances

Call (619) 889-1305 before bringing these items in.

We can also take your new toner for FREE.

Used toner can still be dropped off for a small fee at the Point Loma Recycling Center only.

Call (619) 889-1305

How Printer Recycling Works and What Happens Next

It's straightforward, and you also see every step of it happen.

Bring your printers to one of our drop-off locations or fill out a form for printer collection. We log incoming equipment, and business loads can be recorded by serial number or asset tag upon request.

Data storage removal. Copiers and MFPs are checked for internal drives and memory before anything else happens. Storage is then removed and routed to destruction. This comes first deliberately, a drive can’t slip through a shredder line intact if it was pulled at intake.

Toner and ink cartridges, waste toner boxes, drum units and fuser assemblies then come out and go to their own processing streams.

After that, working current-model machines may be tested, sanitized, and prepared for reuse. Reuse beats recycling, a working printer that runs another three years avoids a replacement being manufactured.

Finally, what’s left is broken down into steel chassis, aluminum, copper from motors and wiring, circuit board, and plastics from the housing and trays.

Before we leave, you get a certificate of data destruction and a full report with every drive’s serial number, the date, the method, ready to drop straight into your compliance file.

We take only the destroyed material and recycle it at our Point Loma facility, which holds R2v3 certification, so your R2v3 certified data destruction and responsible recycling are handled end to end, by one provider.

Free printer recycling San Diego
Free printer toner recycling in San Diego

Where to Recycle a Printer in San Diego

Areas We Serve

Desktop printers, all-in-ones, scanners, and fax machines are accepted free at all six sites, while floor-standing copiers and office equipment go to a Recycling Center instead.

We also provide free e-waste pickup across all of San Diego County, coordinated from our locations like Point Loma, Chula Vista, San Marcos, Miramar, Oceanside, and Kearny Mesa.

Call Us : (619) 889-1305

Providing Dream E-Waste Services To:

Why Choose Dream Electronic Recycling

We treat copiers as data-bearing devices, not office furniture, so storage is removed and destroyed as standard, and data destruction is the default on every device we take in.

  • Business Certificates of Destruction are free and list serial numbers, while most competitors charge for this
  • On-site drive destruction for lease returns and regulated environments is also available
  • We take the big ones, such as floor-standing copiers, plotters, wide-format and production units that retailers and drop-off programs won't touch
  • A large copier dropped off is free, however heavy it is, since the fee is for collection, not the machine
  • Free, at every location, with no size limit and no charge for dead machines
  • Six locations, three of them open weekends and one open Sundays
  • We'll point you elsewhere when it's better, loose cartridges are usually free via manufacturer mail-back, and we'll say so
  • R2v3 certified and CalRecycle-registered (CEWID #127772)
  • Set up for volume, so print rooms, school labs, medical practices, MSPs, and lease-return projects get scheduled collection
  • Locally owned, operating since 2015

You can read through our Secure Hard Drive Shredding and Destruction page to learn more about our process.

  • R2v3 certification badge
  • CalRecycle approved e-waste collector and recycler logo
  • CalEPA logo
  • DTSC (California Department of Toxic Substances Control) logo
  • RIOS certified recycler badge
Business printer free e-waste recycling

Schedule Printer Recycling in San Diego

Bring printers to any of our six San Diego County locations free of charge, no appointment needed. If you are clearing a print room or returning a leased copier, tell us how many devices you have and whether drive destruction is needed, and we'll confirm whether your pickup qualifies as free.

Schedule Pickup

Frequently Asked Questions

At any of our six San Diego County locations, free of charge and with no appointment needed. Point Loma opens Monday to Saturday from 8:00 AM, and our Oceanside site is open seven days, including Sundays.

No, printers are accepted free at all six locations regardless of size, brand or condition, including floor-standing copiers, provided you can get them to us. Some recyclers charge for printers because they’re bulky and low in recoverable metal value, but we don’t.

Office copiers and multifunction printers almost always do. Digital photocopiers sold since 2002 have included hard drives, which retain images of documents scanned, copied and faxed, plus address books, fax logs and network credentials. Home inkjets generally don’t. Either way, we remove and destroy storage from every copier and MFP we receive.

No, leave them in the printer. Cartridges dropped off loose are $2 each, but one still sitting inside the machine comes in with it at no extra cost. That’s the cheapest route and it saves you handling toner. Loose cartridges can also go free via manufacturer mail-back programs.

No, printers are electronic waste in California and therefore cannot go in household trash, a commercial dumpster, or a curbside recycling bin. Residual toner also adds a second problem. Recycling them is free, so the trash is the more expensive option once you account for the fine.

All of them, including inkjet, laser, all-in-one, dot matrix, thermal, receipt, label, photo, portable and 3D printers, plus copiers, multifunction printers, plotters, wide-format and production units. We also take scanners, fax machines, typewriters, print servers and printer cables.

Yes, at no charge. Whether it’s paper jams that never cleared, dead print heads, cracked casings, or printers that won’t power on, condition makes no difference. The steel, copper, and circuit board inside are the same whether the machine prints or not.

For most home printers, a factory reset from the settings menu is enough before you recycle it. For an office copier or MFP, however, a menu reset often doesn’t overwrite the hard drive, so the reliable answer is physical removal and destruction of the drive, which we do as standard on every machine we take in.

Yes, provided that the toner is sealed inside its cartridge and not leaking. So bring the printer as it is. What we can’t accept, though, is loose or spilled toner powder outside a cartridge, which is a combustible dust and respiratory hazard needing different handling. Call first if a cartridge has split.

Yes, pickup is free when you have five or more computing devices, including printers, computers, laptops, monitors, or servers, counted together. Drop-off is always free.