- Apr 24, 2013
- 1,200
As human beings living in modern times, we’ve all experienced our share of pain and loss — not because we don’t always get what we want out of life or because it ends in death, but because we’ve all owned printers at some point. You might be able to set up a command line Bitcoin mining rig, but there’s a good chance you’ve had more trouble trying to connect to a wireless printer at your place of work. Depending on your age, even if you are Printer Wizard, Lord of Paper, you’ve still most likely spent way too much money on toner cartridges. If a few hundred dollars seems expensive to a single person, imagine what an entire government must be spending on toner.
One 14-year-old middle schooler did just that for a science fair, and devised a way for the government to save $400 million per year while still being able to print as many documents as it always has.
Suvir Mirchandani, a student of Dorseyville Middle School, noticed that he was receiving many more paper handouts than when he was in elementary school, and began thinking about the efficiency of that. So, as is middle school tradition, this became his science fair project.
Suvir pointed out that printer ink is twice as expensive as French perfume by volume, which CNN noted is actually correct. He compared four different popular typefaces — Times New Roman, Garamond, Century Gothic, and Comic Sans — and focused on how much ink was used per each letter, focusing on the common characters a, e, o, r, and t. He enlarged and printed each letter on card stock, cut them out, and weighed them.
He found that, if the school switched to Garamond — which employs thinner strokes, and thus, less ink — it could cut down on its ink consumption by 24%, saving $21,000 per year. Eventually, Suvir repeated his tests on sample pages from the Government Printing Office — which has an annual printing budget of $1.8 billion — and found the same results. If both the GPO and state governments switched their font usage to thinner fonts such as Garamond, they could save around $400 million per year in ink alone.
Hilariously, a spokesperson for the Government Printing Office one-upped poor Suvir by noting that, actually, the administration is trying to become more environmentally friendly by moving content to the web rather than printing anything at all. However, Suvir responded in kind, noting that not everything will be moved to the internet, and changing fonts can still save money.
