Cool Hunting

by Ariston Anderson

If one of your resolutions was to start shifting toward a green lifestyle, we've got an easy way for you to start that involves little more than using a new eco-friendly font. While it may seem that a change in typography won't have a big impact, consider that electronic pollution (or E-waste) takes up 2% of America's trash in landfills, but 70% of our overall toxic waste. With few printing cartridges going toward recycling programs, each year over 350 million cartridges are thrown out and each one can take up to 450 years to decompose. And that means spending more money to fill up your costly printer.

Fortunately, a company from Utrecht, Netherlands has developed a font that can help you save on costly ink and toner refills. "After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well," says the company, Spranq. After much research on how much ink could be taken away to preserve readability, Spranq has developed a new "holey" font which uses 20% less ink than normal fonts. While we wouldn't recommend it for high resolution displays, or for sending in a fancy cover letter, it's perfect for daily tasks that need a printing job.

Best of all? The font is free to download from Spranq. It's simple math that small changes can lead up to big differences. The more people who download the font, the less cartridges we'll see in landfills.