Performance Management Blog

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:

More resources on green fonts and ink reduction initiatives

The resources used and recommended by the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay are:

References

University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, 2010, Going green with Century Gothic, available at http://www.uwgb.edu/compserv/topics/CenturyGothicGreen.htm (accessed 20 April 2010)

smartKPIs.com (2010), “KPI examples for Environmental Care”, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi/functional-areas/csr-sustainability-environment-care/environmental-care/ (accessed 20 April 2010)

Tags: Database of KPIs, Green fonts, Green initiatives, Library of KPIs, Paper reduction, Recycling, Sustainability, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 5:32 pm and is filed under KPI, Library of KPI examples, Measure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.