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Home → Environment → Eco tips

Middle school student shows the US government could save $400 million by switching fonts

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
March 31, 2014
in Eco tips, News

How important are details, when it comes to saving money? Any accountant will tell you: really important. A middle school student in Pittsburg thought the same thing - he discovered that the government could save $400 million dollars just by change the typeface it uses. Inspired by a school project on saving ink, he calculated that his school could reduce ink use by a quarter simply by changing their typeface from Times New Roman to Garamond.

If his school could reduce ink use by 25% by dropping TNR, then so could every other school, right? The figure might vary a little, but that seems like a safe assumption. Apply that to the government, and you really start seeing the impact: this could slash its ink usage by a similar margin and save $400 million! Now we're getting somewhere!

Ink is surprisingly expensive: pound for pound, it's more expensive than perfume.

"Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume," Suvir says with a chuckle.

He's right - Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75. So he decided to set out how ink could be saved; his methodology was simple, but to the point (I'm trying really hard to avoid puns, but alas, sometimes I fail). First, he charted how often each character was used in four different typefaces: Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans. Then, using a simple commercial software (APFill® Ink Coverage Software) he measured how much ink each font would require. To verify these findings, he printed enlarged versions of letters and weighed them - the results were consistent. Garamond, with its thinner strokes, reduces ink consumption by about 24%.

If his school would switch from TNR to Garamond, they would save $21.000 annually. If the entire government, which prints a huge amount of documents each day also did it, they would save $136 million on ink, and if state and local governments got in on the change, the entire country could save another $234 million. That adds up to $400 million in the US alone!

Of course, Suvir was not the first ever to suggest using a different typeface - several Universities are already using thinner fonts in their emails and documents for this specific purpose. But one can only wonder - if a sixth grader saw a simple way to save this much money and resources... why aren't policymakers all over it already ? It's as easy as changing fonts.

 

Tags: fonttypeface

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