Category Archives:efficiency

17
Apr

Candle Holder Recycles Your Candle Wax for You

Candle Holder that Recycles Wax

How cool is this candle holder that recycles its own wax by design?

The Rekindle Candle is a patent-pending candle holder that diverts melted candle wax into an area with extra wick, so it can be used again. In a Grist interview with Benjamin Shine, the candlestick's designer, he said:

How long it lasts, Shine says, depends on the specific candle — some burn faster, some are drippier — but you might be able to reuse the wax as many as five times.

That's a lot of recovered wax!

The Rekindle Candle isn't available for sale yet, but keep an eye on Shine's blog to see when it's going to be up for sale. In the meantime, you can recycle your candle wax the old fashioned way, by using it to make new candles. Want to see how? Check out our tutorial for how to recycle old candle wax!

h/t: Planetsave

Posted:   |   Categories: Benjamin Shine, candle holder, candle wax, Concept+Design, efficiency, Innovation, Recycling, recycling candle wax
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02
Apr

Could switching fonts save millions of dollars?

Garamond: How switching fonts could save the U.S. government $400 million per year

The tl;dr version of this story is yes! The long version, though, is fascinating.

Fourteen-year-old Suvir Mirchandani's science project could save the U.S. federal government around $400 million in printing costs annually. The best part? Those savings represent using fewer resources. They wouldn't have to print less or cut back in any way. All they'd have to do is begin using Garamond - a font that's included for free on basically any computer.

The font is nothing fancy. What Garamond has going for it are its thinner lines, which means using less ink to create each letter. When you consider that the fed prints around 2500 documents per day, that's millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of ounces of precious printer ink.

Garamond: How switching fonts could save millions

Mirchandani's science project began at the school level. He did the math and discovered that his school could save $21,000 per year by using 24 percent less printer ink. Just by changing the fonts that teachers and administrators use in their handouts. His project was so impressive that it made it into Harvard's Journal of Emerging Inventors.

Want more? Check out the video report from CNN:

image via Gael Varoquaux

Posted:   |   Categories: conservation, efficiency, fonts, garamond, News+Opinion, switching fonts
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