A high school student from Pittsburgh has discovered a simple but innovative method that could save the US government approximately $370 million (£222m) a year in printing ink costs: Change the typeface it uses.
Discovery: thanks to his ingenious science fair project, the fourteen-year-old Suvir Mirchandani began his investigation into which typefaces used the least amount of printer ink as a science fair project at Dorseyville Middle School when he learnt of the large amounts of money his school was spending on printer ink. “Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume,” Mirchandani told CNN.
Using a sample of the most popular typefaces he received in class handouts from his teachers, Mirchandani set about measuring how much ink was used in the most commonly used characters (e, t, a, o and r). For each typeface Mirchandani enlarged the letters, printed them out and weighed them to estimate the amount of ink used in the average document. He found that between Times New Roman, Garamond, Century Gothic and Comic Sans, the thinner strokes of Garamond used 24% more ink than its counterparts. By his calculations, his school district could save $21,000 (£12,600) annually if they permanently switched to the font.
Mirchandani’s findings were submitted to the Journal for Emerging Investigations (JEI), who challenged the student to apply his project to a larger scale. Scaling up his findings and applying them to the US Government, Mirchandani discovered that almost $400m could be saved in ink costs.
When contacted, a spokesperson for the Government Printing Office described Mirchandani’s findings as “remarkable” but claimed the government would continue to focus on becoming more environmentally sustainable by shifting content to the Internet.
Despite this, the student hopes that his project could still be relevant in the real world. “I recognise it’s difficult to change someone’s behaviour, that’s the most difficult part” Mirchandani said. “I definitely would love to see some actual changes and I’d be happy to go as far as possible to make that change possible.”
To be sure of his findings, he printed out large sample letters in the fonts and weighed them, before concluding that Garamond, with its more slender type face, was the most cost-effective.
Savings: Switching from fonts like Times New Roman, above, to Garamond, below, cuts ink use and print costs
