Alistair Dabbs

Green has become the big business issue of 2007; every company wants to be seen as environmentally friendly. The optimist in me would like to believe that airlines, food producers and heavy industries are today run by people who grew up influenced by John Craven’s Newsround in the 1970s and 1980s. The pessimist in me sniggers that it’s a cynical plan to milk a trusting market.

IT is an easy target for criticism thanks to its massive power consumption and all those obscure noxious chemicals that are used in hardware manufacture. But the area about which IT vendors seem to make the loudest “green” claims is printing. I guess this is because of printing’s association with paper and, therefore, with trees, the enduring symbol of nature. Printer manufacturers don’t want to be seen to be encouraging people to kill trees.

The hippy-green publicity bandwagon is starting to get silly. Brother says it is working “in harmony with the environment”; Epson refers to its “Earth-friendly” products; Canon wants to be known as an “eco-tech corporation”. Kyocera’s corporate motto is “Respect the divine and love people”.

If you think a noisy chunk of mains-powered metal, plastic and electrically charged microdust that churns out management accounts and bad smells fits harmoniously within Mother Earth’s natural eco-sphere, I have some Wiccan friends who beg to differ.

We should also question that Holy Grail of so-called “green” benchmarks for business, the ISO 14000 series of standards. Achieving ISO 14001, for example, means that you have an environmental management system in place - but this is all about procedures, not proof that you are ecologically better than any other company. It’s a bit like your company publicising that it adheres to employment law - ­ this doesn’t mean you’re a good employer, it means that you fire people nicely.

There’s a great deal more to printing than killing trees, anyway. How is the ink and toner made, and are there any toxic residues? Does the manufacturer have a cartridge return-and-recycle operation in place? Will it collect the old printer when you buy a new one, and how will it dispose of it?

The industry needs to ditch silly mottos about harmony with nature when they are just not true. Printing is not an eco-friendly business any more than McDonald’s selling salad makes it a haven for healthy eating.

The firms that deserve our respect are those that acknowledge their “environmental impact” and demonstrate ways in which they are limiting the damage. Printer manufacturers certainly talk the talk, but can they deliver on it?