I’ve just come out of an “Eco” briefing with Sony at IFA, and it should be no surprise at all that they’re banging their own eco drum pretty fiercely. But, in that, they’re absolutely no different from all the other manufacturers at this show.

Sharp, I’m told, declared themselves “world eco champions”, and Toshiba dedicated a number of slides in their press conference about the fact they were aiming to “improve our eco-efficiency by ten times” by 2050.

And there’s another thing all these companies have in common too. They not only want you to replace existing products, they want you to actually own more electronic products. Can these two competing demands ever live with each other?

Naturally, all of them would say yes. “We want to sell more devices but we also want to achieve less energy consumed as a result,” declared Thomas Teckentrup, the general manager of Toshiba Europe at yesterday’s press briefing.

If it is to happen, it will almost certainly follow the blueprint set out by Sony Ericsson. Its representative on the eco round table had the most to say, citing the example of its “green phone” (the C901 GreenHeart) that is also a mainstream model.

He explained they’d cut the extra weight from excess packaging and manuals from 550g in the previous equivalent phone to only 42g, due to factors such as putting the manual on the phone rather than on paper.

And the key is that the green phone in question is a mainstream model that sells in huge volume. As the Sony Ericsson rep pointed out, there’s no point in a company claiming they’re green just because they have one niche model with amazing green credentials.

Sony Ericsson also intends to roll out the lessons it’s learned to the rest of its line, so whichever new phone you buy from the company in the future you can be pretty darn sure it’s eco-friendly.

Not for nothing is Sony Ericsson one of the leaders in Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics chart.

But then where is Sony? A distinctly mid-table position right now, despite the fact it was keen to point out that it minimises the waste produced from its products, and that it has some incredibly low-power TVs on sale.

And, as I pointed out to the panel, how can Sony claim to be encouraging the long-term use of its products – and in particular its laptops – when it charges so much for the one consumable, the battery?

The answer was the verbal equivalent to shrugged shoulders, and perhaps I’m wrong/naïve/foolish to suggest it (feel free to abuse me in the comments below), but to me it summarises in one tiny detail the battle between greater profit and sales and the need for companies to be green.

(If I was a more cynical man, I’d rephrase that last point to “the need for companies to be seen to be green”.)

To be fair to Sony, it’s published a corporate social responsibility report since 1994, so it can’t be accused of bandwagon jumping. It also faces big financial pressure, with the company making an operating loss of 228 billion Yen in the 2008/09 financial year.

Bearing all this in mind, it’s surely too optimistic to expect companies to cut their environmental waste unless there is governmental pressure. Much as I hate to suggest we hand over yet more power to the EU, without that sort of backing all this green talk is likely to remain hot air for some time to come.