Student discovers Font Change Could Save Government Millions

Suvir Mirchandani, a 14-year-old middle student of Dorseyville Middle School in Pittsburgh, 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 a science fair project, he analyzed a bunch of figures and determined that if his school switched to Garamond font instead of Times Roman, it could cut down on its the school's ink consumption by 24%.  That would save the school system a total of $21,000 per year. He then repeated his tests on sample pages from the Government Printing Office — which has an annual printing budget of $1.8 billion — and found the exact 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. Of course a spokesperson for the Government Printing Office one-upped young Suvir by noting that 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. It seems that I remember a number of years ago when they said paper was going to become obsolete because of the use of word processors. Yeah, right.