I won’t consider myself to be a big tree hugger or anything but I hate when things are wasted. One of my pet hates is when people print off oodles of things and don’t use them or when the colour printer is used completely willy-nilly. I spotted an article recently on Environment* one of the New Scientist blogs that outlined two products that people could use to make their computers more energy efficient. The first product is GreenPrint Software which highlights and eliminates unwanted pages when printing thus saving paper, ink, money and millions of trees. The way GreenPrint works is that it analyses each page of every document that is sent to the printer and looks for typically wasteful characteristics such as, if the last page of the document just had a URL, logo or legal jargon on it. GreenPrint can be purchased for twenty five dollars from printgreener.com.

The second product is Local Cooling, this application can be downloaded from the website for free and works by automatically optimising your PC's power consumption by using a more effective power save mode. It also shows you your savings in real-time and translates it to more environmental terms such as how many trees and gallons of oil you have saved. The Local Cooling website wants to introduce 100,000,000 PC users into the Local Cooling community. If a 100 million people optimised the efficiency of their computers’ energy consumption then they could prevent over 300 billion kg of CO2 gas emissions which is equivalent to over 1.8 billion gallons of oil and this is just in the first year alone. I think these are two pretty nifty ideas which could reduce the energy wasted by computers everyday.