N increasing number of schools and nonprofit groups are collecting empty ink cartridges from computer printers for recycling. But the trend is being driven by more than environmental friendliness. There is a surprising amount of money in those hunks of plastic, some of which ends up paying for things like school computers and famine relief.

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What makes the cartridges valuable is strong demand from an emerging industry of companies called remanufacturers, many of them started by entrepreneurs who spotted a market niche. These companies overhaul and refill inkjet and laser cartridges and sell them to consumers at prices considerably lower than what printer manufacturers charge for new cartridges. By rewarding schools, charities and other groups for sending in the empties, the industry has enlisted an army of cartridge hunters.

One of the largest cartridge recycling programs is run by the Funding Factory, which says it has signed up 22,000 institutions, most of them schools, that send in used cartridges and, more recently, cellphones. The Funding Factory provides promotional material for school fund-raising campaigns and boxes with prepaid shipping labels that schools can use to send the collected materials to the company. Participants can log on to www.fundingfactory.com to track a tally of reward points and redeem those points for cash or computers and other school supplies.

Participants say they are happy with the program's simplicity and with the money it generates. Joy Hogg, technology director at St. Ann School, a parochial school in Cadillac, Mich., said she had set up an "inkjet route" for picking up cartridges from local banks, the sheriff's office, the county courthouse and the parish church. "I don't go through any red tape to pay for shipping," she said, "and there is no paperwork for the school." The school has acquired 40 headphones worth about $15 each through the Funding Factory project.

The simplicity of the program has its price. Funding Factory is a division of ERS Imaging Supplies of Erie, Pa., a broker that assembles batches of cartridges for sale to remanufacturers (www.ers-imaging .com). Although the Funding Factory site does not advertise that option, people who are willing to forgo the free boxes and other conveniences of the program can send their cartridges directly to ERS and get about twice as much money for them. ERS pays about $4 for inkjet cartridges and up to $20 for some laser cartridges.

David Steffens, a senior vice president of ERS and head of the Funding Factory program, said the difference in the amount paid was partly related to the higher cost of running the school program. For example, he said, the Funding Factory pays for all shipping and packaging, even though it is unable to resell a quarter of the cartridges it receives. But even those are recycled, he said.

"We bring in a lot of cartridges that have no market value," Mr. Steffens said, "and for the most part we ship them back to the original manufacturers" for recycling. The program has given schools about $3 million in cash and equipment so far and is likely to distribute up to $2 million more by the end of the year, he said.

Larger groups can get more out of their cartridges by setting up their own programs. Food for the Poor, an international relief organization based in Deerfield Beach, Fla., developed one by working with M.B. Sales, a cartridge broker in Canoga Park, Calif. Businesses or individuals who sign up at www.foodforthepoor.org /recycle get postage-paid boxes they can use to collect cartridges. The boxes go directly to M.B. Sales, which covers all the costs of the program and pays the group up to $22 for laser cartridges and $2 to $4 for inkjets, depending on the model.

The program started in April and, after little more than an announcement in the group's newsletter, is now bringing in a few thousand dollars a month, said Glen Belden, director of corporate and planned giving at Food for the Poor. He said he expected a big expansion as several large companies started participating.

"You send me four of your laser cartridges, and I've just fed a family of five for a year," Mr. Belden said. "It's environmentally conscious, and it's a great awareness builder."

The only potential losers in this recycling equation are printer manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, which have generally sold printers at low prices in hopes of profiting from the sale of pricey replacement cartridges. "It's a classic razor-and-blades business model," said Jim Forrest, an analyst who follows the imaging industry for Lyra Research.

Cheap blades — or cartridges — could dim the luster of that model. Remanufactured and cloned cartridges are now available from many major office supply chains. Office Depot's Web site offers a Hewlett-Packard inkjet model for $29.99, while a remanufactured version sold under the Office Depot name is $21.99. Recycled products and clones now account for 16 percent of the inkjet market, and that figure is expected to come close to doubling by 2006, Mr. Forrest said.

Printer makers have added complex features, like ink-measuring chips, to their cartridges in what remanufacturers say is an effort to make their work harder. The printer makers argue that the modifications are product improvements. They also question the quality of the remanufacturers' offerings and the sincerity of their environmental pitches.

Douglas Vaughan, a spokesman for Hewlett-Packard, said that remanufactured cartridges gave customers more options and that "choice is good." But he added, "At the end of the day, the quality that you're going to get from a refilled or remanufactured ink cartridge is extremely low in relation to what you'll get from HP." Mr. Vaughan said that his company's ink was superior and that the cartridges' print heads and other parts were not designed for reuse.

Hewlett-Packard offers its customers a "take-back program" for all of its cartridges. The company pays for shipping, but it does not pay for the returned cartridges and does not reuse or refill them, Mr. Vaughan said. Instead, they are broken down into their component materials, and about 65 percent of that material can be recycled.

Paying for cartridges might open the company up to antitrust charges from the remanufacturers, Mr. Vaughan said. But unlike Hewlett-Packard, the remanufacturers cannot guarantee that returned cartridges are going to be recycled and not tossed out, he said. "A cartridge does not have an endless life," he said. "If a large percentage of them are going to a landfill because they are not reusable, that may make me think twice about whether I want to contribute to that."

Cartridge remanufacturers dispute those claims about quality and the extent of their recycling. Ian Elliott, a senior vice president at Nu-kote International, a major remanufacturer based in Bardstown, Ky., said his company's remanufactured cartridges were tested in printers and were fully guaranteed. He acknowledged that the company had thrown out many cartridges that could not be resold, but said it now threw out 10 to 15 percent of them and was working hard to reduce that figure to zero. For example, it is now working with a company that can grind up unusable cartridges and turn them into plastic wheels for garbage cans.

Most people who donate cartridges to recycling programs probably have no idea that they are handing over materials that bring significant profit to an upstart industry — one that is generally not welcomed by the cartridges' original manufacturers. David Wood, who campaigns for waste reduction as program director of the GrassRoots Recycling Network, said there was "some need for better accountability throughout these emerging recycling sectors in terms of what's happening to the materials."

But just about any recycling is good recycling, Mr. Wood said, especially when the long-term environmental impact of discarded cartridges is unknown. "The more stuff we can divert from landfills, the better," he said.