Say hello to the BytePac. It’s a hard disk caddy made entirely out of 100% recyclable material (yes, cardboard), but before you jump to any rash, mocking conclusions – as half the office did when it arrived – let me explain how it works.

Pull off the outer sleeve and open the box, and inside there’s room for a 3.5in hard disk (or 2.5in with the included card “adapter”) to sit snugly. At the connection end the box has a flap through which you plug the combined power-and-SATA connector, the other end of which goes to both the mains and to either an eSATA or USB port on your PC. That’s all you need to get the drive running, then simply fold back a ventilation flap on the rear of the box, which doubles up as a stand to prop the drive up off the desk.

This video shows it off neatly. For a cardboard box, it’s actually rather elegant.

The question you might be asking is: why? The BytePac is billed as an alternative to external hard disks, but it’s not as robust as proper external drives, nor is it particularly thin and light. Few people will buy a disk specifically to use in a BytePac when far sleeker solutions are so common.

However, it’s best viewed as an attractive and simple archiving system. Once you’ve bought your first kit with its power box and set of cables (three empty boxes, one cable set, £34), you can simply buy more empty boxes (around £4 each) as and when you need them. Put an old disk in each, sensibly label the side of the box and stack them on a shelf as you would a collection of books. When you need some old data, just pull out the relevant BytePac and plug the cable in – the disk itself need never see the light of day.

You may already have your own archiving setup, and you may be wary of entrusting your valuable data to a cardboard box. But the BytePac is a cheap way to archive a large number of disks, it’s environmentally friendly, and it won’t look like it’s worth nicking if the burglars come round.

I’ve got one here that I’ll be playing with this week, and several people in the office have already made their minds up one way or the other, but I’m interested to hear what you think. Is the BytePac a neat archiving innovation or a piece of cheap tat?

Amid all of the targets, awards and earnest promises, though, I detected plenty of of cynicism. Not from the journalists, but from the employees giving the presentation. Apparently, Kyocera launched its “environmental messaging” back in 1992 but, apparently, back then “no-one gave a crap” – so the scheme was left to fade away.

We were then told that it was revived in 2001 as environmental issues became more important – or, as a Kyocera representative told us, “before green crap was fashionable”. It’s an odd attitude to take, especially since the firm’s executives would surely say that green policies are central to its success.

Then again, maybe the representative was right: the green credentials are only good when it comes to selling products to hemp-wearing hippies who just happen to need printers and, in a sense, the promises and certificates are just another strand of Kyocera’s marketing strategy.

Printer firms aren’t alone in this. Every big company now has a green strategy and, most of the time, they’re keen to show them off: the HP Eco Solutions page touts the firm’s 50-year history of green initiatives, and Sony’s Corporate Social Responsibility page is currently emblazoned with special projects and its “Road to Zero” global environmental plan.

It’s not just IT companies, either: BMW brought one of its F1 cars to last year’s PGA Championship golf, but this year its gas-guzzler was replaced with an exhibition detailing its various green successes.

So, are these genuine attempts to make the world a better place or a cynical strand of marketing from the same executives who, fifteen years ago, simply wouldn’t have bothered with this “green crap”?

And, more importantly, is it working – and would you make a buying decision based on a manufacturer’s green policies? Let me know in the comments.

Kyocera’s Helen Hopper has responded to this blog in our comment section below.

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.

I’m not a tree-hugging, environmental doom monger, but even my green-weary soul was alarmed at the amount of wasted paper, ink and energy such needless printing consumes. Let alone the money. 

HP has a solution to curb the printer fly-tippers called Pool Printing, which ensures the document doesn’t actually print until the person physically goes to the machine to collect it. They have to swipe a card or punch in a pin number before the printer spews out the goods.

That might well reduce the wastage, but the problem is it also punishes the conscientious workers too. If I could reclaim the amount of time I’ve spent standing by our office laserjet, waiting for the thing to warm up before my document came sliding out of the roller, I’d be 21 again. Putting another delay into the process would drive me up the wall.   

However, I’d argue the biggest problem isn’t necessarily the 5% of orphan documents, but the other 95% that are usually only printed on one side and come with needless wasted pages at the end. The vast majority of my printouts are web pages. Nine times out of ten, the text I want to read is on the first sheet. What follows on the second is a blank centre column, with the website’s navigation running down the left and banner ads running down the right. That’s 50% of the printout going straight into the recycling bin.

Now, I know Firefox has a Shrink to Fit option (in the File | Print Preview menu) that can solve this problem, but this makes the print so tiny that I’d need to borrow Deidre Barlow’s specs to read it.

So here’s a challenge for Mozilla, Microsoft and the other browser makers: find a way to print only the interesting bits of web pages and make me feel a little bit better about myself.  

What caused this extra congestion? A bomb threat? Signal failure? No, London Underground has “decided to do its bit for the environment” by turning off “unnecessary” escalators to save energy.

The very same escalators that recently had their zero-watt poster slots replaced with dozens of energy-chomping LCD screens. Which lead down to the lobby containing another half dozen, six-foot LCD screens showing bigger versions of the same video adverts. Which leads to the platforms, with six newly-installed, ginormous projectors blasting video ads on to the platform walls.

If that’s London Underground “doing its bit”, Victoria’s going to be a seaside resort before we know it.  

In the current issue of PC Pro, which has just hit the newsstands, I’ve written a feature in which I document my attempt to leave the National Grid for a week and run my mobile phone, MP3 player and notebook on solar and wind power. If you want to know how I got on then you’ll have to go and buy an issue, but I’ve already received an email from one reader to let me know that he’s been investigating exactly this sort of thing for 16 years already.

Chris Dixon has been playing around with sustainable power for well over a decade, starting with a wind-powered 386, and has got more interested in solar power in recent years as the cost of panels has fallen. The image above is of two 15 Watt panels he has installed in his garden on top of his shower room.

“I set them up on a home built frame so they could be rotated and tilted to track the sun,” explains Chris. “This increases their output considerably but is a hassle! So now I point them due South and tilt them three times during the year to get an optimum sort of position.”

As well as these panels, which after three years have started to degrade slightly, he also has a mono crystalline panel, which is “far more resilient and more powerful for the same surface area”, and outputs 20 watts.

The electricity harvested from these panels is stored in a battery, but a regulator sits in-between to make sure that the battery doesn’t get overcharged.

“Over charging is a sure fire way of killing a battery so the reg box is essential. A deep cycle battery is best as it can stand being discharged more than, say, a car battery. The leisure batteries are cheaper but not as good,” says Chris.

Chris obviously has a great deal of experience with this sort of thing, and his set up can run his 1GHz ThinkPad for three to four hours a day. If anyone has any questions for him then please leave them in the comments – it would be a shame to waste his expertise.

LG’s newest 22in TFT, the W2252TE, is a case in point. Heralded in its press release as “the world’s most energy efficient monitor”, it claims to offer “a 45% reduction (40W) in power consumption, leading the way in environmentally friendly computer screens”.

Inevitably, the question arises: a 45% reduction over what? No comparison is offered, no rival energy-efficient monitor or even the name of a standard monitor against which the LG may have been tested. The 45% reduction could be over the most power-hungry monitor in the world for all we know. And what does that 40W figure in parentheses represent? The power consumption of this monitor? Of the comparison monitor? Or is 40W the reduction itself?

Scrolling to the specs buried right at the bottom of the release we learn that the power consumption of the W2252TE is in fact 22W – surely a more headline-grabbing figure than the “45% energy reduction” that again follows it. So we know the 40W figure must be the monitor to which LG is comparing the W2252TE, but again we’re given no clue as to what monitor this could be. Another LG monitor? A rival manufacturer? Same size or larger? The figures are meaningless without this information.

It’s nothing new to us. Graphics card manufacturers are constantly slapping “world’s fastest” labels onto their latest creations based on individual game benchmarks, while Intel and AMD can both boast the fastest CPUs depending on what applications and tests you quote. And the fact that very few consmuers have the means, or indeed the desire, to test any of these claims for themselves just makes it easier for the big companies to prove anything they like with “facts”.

Taken on good faith the claims about LG’s W2252TE make for good reading, and the company should be applauded for investing in making its products greener. But if manufacturers want their advances to receive the recognition they deserve, a little more information would go an awful long way.

For the past week I’ve been trying out this tiny wind turbine called the HYmini. The fan charges up an internal battery which can power any gadget that connects to its USB port.

I’ve mounted this one on the handlebars of my bike, and my 12-mile commute so far seems to be enough to power my mobile phone. The only downside is that I have to explain what it is to inquisitive cyclists at every red traffic light.

As well as this, the PC Pro offices are currently stuffed full of solar panels, wind-up chargers and various battery packs. It’s all research for a feature coming up in the next issue, which asks if it’s possible to power all of your gadgets with sustainable energy. Check out issue 165 for the answer.

Top Tip: If you ever have to design a “green” gadget, why not make it an attractive colour? Green green products are a cliché.