My adventures in green IT are continuing to uncover some rather unexpected innovations that while designed for one purpose are inadvertently helping to reduce IT departments' size twelve environmental footprints.

Having looked at the unexpected energy efficiency of virtualisation and surprisingly low power consumption of thin clients, the latest inadvertently kind to trees innovation comes from printing hardware specialist Ricoh, which recently developed a new compliance-based document management tool only to find it also led to a dramatic fall in paper consumption.

The new system is known as locked print and means that once you send a job to print you then have to go to the printer and authorise the release of the documents. The function is available as standard on all new Ricoh multifunction devices.

According to Ricoh's product manager Neil O'Donoghue this release mechanism was originally designed as an accounting tool that would enhance security and ensure sensitive documents weren't left lying around on the printer.

But if you cast your mind back to the last time you printed a document, got distracted and then never went to pick it up - it shouldn’t take long, it was probably about five minutes ago – you'll quickly realise that this release mechanism can also lead to a massive saving in the amount of paper consumed.

It is these types of innovations that are critical to the success of any green IT initiative in that while they have a clear environmental benefit they cause no discernable impact on the end user. Sure you have to get up, but that was the case anyway and you won't spend long standing by the printer given that most modern models spit out paper with machine gun rapidity.

It is a sad state of affairs that it is all but impossible to get people to think about the resources they are using, but that is the way of the world so technology suppliers have to find ways to engineer out waste without causing the user any inconvenience, and for this Ricoh and other printer manufacturers working along similar lines should be applauded.

On another note it is always frustrating to be beaten to a zeitgeist, but while I've been preparing a series of articles on Green IT for the 4th of September issue of IT Week our sister publication Computing has this week launched its own Green Computing Campaign.

Still, great minds think alike and all that and Computing's campaign, which invites firms to sign up to a charter pledging they will act to reduce their IT department's environmental impact, is to be applauded for further raising the profile of this increasingly important issue.

24 Aug 2006