Eco KPIs – tracking ink and paper reduction initiatives with green metrics
Green Bay saves money by going green with green fonts
An excellent example of going green and saving money is provided by the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. In order to reduce campus printing costs, their Computing and Information Technology Department had the initiative to change their preferred font from the most commonly used one – Arial to the Century Gothic font.
The new font uses 30% less ink or toner. Taking into account that ink accounts for about 60% of the cost of the printed page, and it is also quite expensive – about $10,000 a gallon, with toner cartridges and drums not far behind – the savings are substantial (University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, 2010).
The IT department switched automatically the default font for Outlook across campus to Century Gothic, and strongly encouraged everyone in the campus to do the same for other software programs too, such as Word, Excel and Entourage for Macintosh.
Such initiatives to reduce ink and toner, can be complemented with initiatives that address paper consumption. Both types of initiatives – targeting the volume of paper and volume of ink used can have a big impact on lowering printing costs. More than reducing costs, a green attitude like this one will generate supplementary benefits for the people involved and gradually can make and impact on environment overall.
smartKPIs.com (2010) contains a variety of measures and eco KPI examples that can help keeping track of the impact of efficient paper use initiatives:
- % Reduced paper consumption due to duplexing
- # Recycled paper
- % Consumption of recycled paper
- % Overall paper reduction
More resources on green fonts and ink reduction initiatives
The resources used and recommended by the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay are:
- http://blog.printer.com/2009/04/printing-costs-does-font-choice-make-a-difference/
- http://ca.tech.yahoo.com/blogs/the_gadget_hound/rss/article/3751
- http://www.printgreener.com/pdfs/GreenPrint%20White%20Paper%20September%2008.pdf
- http://pcworld.about.com/news/Aug282003id112199.htm
References
- University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, 2010, Going green with Century Gothic
- smartKPIs.com (2010), “KPI examples for Environmental Care”
Tags: Environment performance, Government performance, KPI, Performance in USA, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
