Whether Suvir’s stats are correct or not, and there is some dispute over that [Ref: ‘Save $400m by switching fonts’: Unfortunately it won’t work for the US government – or for you‘] the stats about Ryman Eco are rather impressive.
“To put into context how great an effect changing the default printer font can have, consider that almost 1.5 billion printer cartridges are sold globally each year, which contain toxic, oil-intensive, and largely non-biodegradable materials that can take cover 1,000 years to break down. Ryman Eco uses an average 33% less ink than standard fonts including Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Verdana and 27% less ink than the leading sustainable font. Simply switching Ryman Eco when printing would save over 490 million ink cartridges and nearly 15 million barrels of oil–equivalent to 6.5 million tons of CO2 emissions a year, according to Grey London.”
You can read the full article by Fast Company here, which goes on to say “While being environmentally responsible is sure to grab initial attention, Leonard says that just being green was not enough. The font had to look good. “Good stuff or ecological stuff often feels like a compromise. It’s never quite as beautiful or crafted as it could be. And we wanted to make a font that worked for businesses but also for designers and art directors.”
Ryman Eco does indeed look rather impressive.
You can download and use the font for free yourself here: http://www.rymaneco.co.uk/
Given its green credentials and that impressive CO2 emission reduction potential, we are going to trial this font on our documentation that we create for our customers. We are also going to use it for email messages, which are often printed out, to make the most of the ink saving opportunity. We will also alter our website CSS so that anyone printing content from the site will do that using Ryman Eco.
By making sure that Ryman Eco is the default font for printing, we’ll be doing our bit to combat the ever present danger of Climate Change. Please consider doing the same by installing and using this font today. To facilitate that, we will reference the font on our outbound communications. We’ve also uploaded it here!
ryman-eco.zip