Reducing paper use through recycling and dual-sided printing had been talked about before as a way to save money and conserve resources, but there was less attention paid to the ink for which the paper served as a canvas for history and algebra handouts.
"Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume," Suvir Mirchandani says with a chuckle.
He's right: Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75.
So Suvir decided to focus his project on finding ways to cut down on the costly liquid.
Collecting random samples of teachers' handouts, Suvir concentrated on the most commonly used characters (e, t, a, o and r).
First, he charted how often each character was used in four different typefaces: Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans. Then he measured how much ink was used for each letter, using a commercial tool called APFill® Ink Coverage Software.
Next he enlarged the letters, printed them and cut them out on cardstock paper to weigh them to verify his findings. He did three trials for each letter, graphing the ink usage for each font.
(There is more to the story which I encourage you to read at http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/27/living/student-money-saving-typeface-garamond-schools/index.html?hpt=us_c2)
Analysis:
I am thoroughly impressed that a kid, in today's world, did all of this research to essentially save schools money and make incredible discoveries on how to do little things to help the environment. It would have been so easy to just be like "Oh someone else will think of this" or "someone else has probably already done the same thing", but he went for it and impressed Harvard and all these big names.
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