It's Not Easy Being Green

some ideas of things you can do to be more green

V1 Staff | July 25, 2012

Dot Your I’s and Cross Your T’s
using less ink with green fonts

This spring UW-Green Bay announced that it would save thousands of dollars each year by simply switching fonts. Though it sounds minor, the university’s change from Arial to Century Gothic uses 30 percent less ink, and a gallon of printer ink runs thousands of dollars. An even more aggressive option is the Spranq Eco Sans font, which actually has small holes within each letter where ink isn’t used and eyes barely register them. The company that developed it says it uses 25 percent less ink than “traditional” fonts. I wonder how much we’d save by learning the Wingdings language …

Right Out of the Bag
why you should always have reusable bags

The EPA has estimated between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year
Less than 1 percent are recycled, and it actually costs more to recycle one than produce one (Christian Science Monitor)
One ton of bags costs $4,000 to process and recycle, which can be then sold for $32 (San Francisco Dept. of the Enviro.)
Plastic bags account for more than 10 percent of garbage washed up on the U.S. coastline (Natl Marine Debris Monitoring Program)
They eventually break down and contaminate soils and waterways (CNN)
Nearly 200 species of sea life die from bags (World Wildlife Fund)
Somewhere in the central pacific, between California and Japan, floats an island of trash (mostly plastic bags) larger than Texas. (The Independent)
By using cloth bags, we save six plastic ones a week. That’s 288 bags a year. Or 22,176 in a lifetime. If one in five people in the U.S. did this, that’s 1.33 quadrillion bags in a lifetime.