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Comment by fsk | Hacker News Reader

The reason you have problems with markers is that, when a marker is out of ink, people put it back on the whiteboard instead of throwing it in the trash.

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That's a strange phenomena. People don't seem to think of whiteboard markers as disposable things. If one isn't writing they think it either needs to be fixed, or that they aren't using it correctly and it might resume writing later. I've tried to fight this by ostentatiously throwing them immediately in the trash the first time they stop writing, and it seems to be catching. I don't encounter nearly as many empty ones as I used to.

The problem is likely that there aren't spares available. For some reason companies are notorious for locking up whiteboard pens and only giving new ones when you've signed some obscure form in triplicate.

I feel irrationally responsible. I used to steal them out of the stationary cupboard in high school during the 1980s and give them away to anyone who wanted some, and was surprised at how popular they were with other students. At the time I thought that either everyone else liked art class as much as I did, or that perhaps some of them were using them for graffiti, but some years later it dawned on me that they provided a relatively safe way to abuse solvents :-.

> People don't seem to think of whiteboard markers as disposable things. //

Perhaps that's because they're usually refillable - the writing tip lasts much longer than the ink supply.

Just need a small green bin with the "chasing arrow" logo marked "marker recycling."

Then at night the custodians will just tip it into the trash as they do with most recycling containers now.

Usually when a marker "runs out" it just has all the ink drained to the back of the pen. If you hold the pen with the tip facing down, it'll drain the ink back to the tip and it will write again.

Considering the fact that most whiteboards are installed vertically and that writing involves the tip being at a higher elevation than the back of the pen, this doesn't seem very sustainable. Yet another reason to prefer blackboards.

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