My last story covered ways to reduce energy and resource use by 50% doing things like adding an aerator to your sink and swapping out your old fashioned light bulbs for CFL’s. Some of the tips were fairly obvious but one stood out from the pack as being both relevant and easy to implement. A company called SPRANQ has created a line of computer fonts for both Mac and PC that reduce the amount of ink required for printing. This font line is called Ecofont and it’s available in two different flavors, the free basic version and a higher end corporate version that costs just ~$1.5 per computer per month with a minimum of 100 computers. Either one of these options will instantly help you save ink.
SPRANQ is a dutch company with a creative line of products. Ecofont was created through a desire to save resources and is inspired by dutch holey cheese. The font looks much like a normal font but instead of using solid black lines it has tiny holes throughout the letters, much the way that bone marrow, plane wings, and other light weight materials contain holes and pockets of air. By cutting out bits of ink from every letter printed, Ecofont uses 20% less ink than an average font would require.
The Ecofont works best in OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office. Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results and letters will appear like the above image. Get your free copy of Ecofont by visiting their website here and selecting your location, then begin green printing!
Here are a few more bright ideas from the people behind Ecofont:
- End Users: print only when necessary, use a modern, efficient printer and use unbleached paper.
- Graphic Designers: use modern color separation techniques to avoid unnecessary wastage in ink. When choosing paper, take the environment into account.
- (Offset) Printers: avoid modern laser techniques that make ink indivisible from the paper. Keep an eye out for new innovations such as plant-based ink.
- Printer Manufacturers: invest in environment-conscious innovation.
