The letter e

You can write it with one fluid swoop of a pen or one tap of the keyboard. The most commonly used letter in the English dictionary. Simple, right? Now imagine it printed out millions of times on thousands of forms and documents. Then think of how much ink would be needed. OK, so that may have been a first for you, but it came naturally to 14-year-old Suvir Mirchandani when he was trying to think of ways to cut waste and save money at his Pittsburgh-area middle school. It all started when he noticed he was getting a lot more handouts than he did in elementary school. Interested in applying computer science to promote environmental sustainability, Suvir decided he was going to figure out if there was a better way to minimize the constant flurry of paper and ink. Reducing paper use through recycling and dual-sided printing has been talked about before as a way to save money and conserve resources, but there has been less attention paid to the ink for which paper served as a canvas for history and algebra handouts. Ink is twice as expensive as French perfume by volume - Chanel No. 5 perfume costs US$38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to US$75. So Suvir decided to focus his project on finding ways to cut down on the costly liquid. His solution - change the font to Garamond.

So how did he come to that conclusion? Here's how: collecting random samples of teachers' handouts, Suvir concentrated on the more 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. From this analysis, Suvir figured out that by using Garamond with its thinner strokes, his school district could reduce its ink consumption by 24%, and in turn save as much as US$21,000 annually. This is seriously worth considering, as this is money that could be put towards more sports equipment, more instruments for the music department, more props and costumes for performing arts, more art supplies, more desks, more textbooks, or maybe another teaching position in the district.