Use Less Ink When You Print

In our last story we 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 that work 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 have holes and pockets of air. As a result of this simple holey solution Ecofont uses 20% less ink than an average font would require.

The Ecofont works best in OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office 2007. 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 colour separation techniques to avoid unnecessary wastage in ink. In paper choice, take the environment into account.
• (Offset) Printers: avoid modern laser techniques that make ink indivisible from the paper. Keep an eye on innovations, such as plant-based ink.
• Printer Manufacturers: invest in environment-conscious innovation.