Recent news of a 14-year old Pennsylvania student’s idea to save printer ink by switching to a san-serif font prompted GSA to remind federal employees of its PrintWise campaign and to adopt more conservative printing habits. (SuvirMirchandani demonstrated how his school district could save $21,000 a year by using Garamond typeface by default, and it turns out the federal government could save over $300 million a year by following suit.)
GSA rightly noted the student’s idea turned attention back to practical steps toward cutting government waste. The PrintWise campaign in particular has emphasized using smaller font sizes and printing on both sides of a piece of paper, which also has the potential to save hundreds of millions.
Additional ways to conserve printing resources: print in black and white, print at draft quality, set printers to automatically go into sleep mode, remove personal printers from workstations and freeze purchase of personal desktop printers.
