Manufacturers are coming up with more ways to be “green” – this can include anything from the production of energy-efficient products to incorporating easily recyclable materials in the product and tweaking manufacturing processes to emit less waste and use less energy. Depending on your priorities when choosing a product there are a lot of choices on the market and the field is growing as companies adopt greener corporate practices.

When surfing the net for a computer based on its features you will often find a search category for energy efficiency. The Energy Star program through the federal government is probably the most easily recognizable symbol of a device that conserves energy. There is another organization that is not as well known as a standard of environmentally friendly electronics; this global certification program is EPEAT. EPEAT judges products based on 23 criteria including materials used in the products, packaging, corporate environmental policies, and energy efficiency (see www.Epeat.net).

EPEAT lists Lenovo, HP, and Dell as manufacturers at the top of their list for desktops and workstation desktops. One of Lenovo’s best- selling desktops is the ThinkCentre M90 Tower, which received a Gold rating from EPEAT, based largely on materials selection. This means that Lenovo, among other things, eliminated toxic materials and utilized recyclable and recycled materials. Also, Lenovo scored high for their corporate environmental policy, which focuses on compliance with voluntary standards, preventing pollution, and a conscientious effort to follow sound environmental practices from product development to the end of the product’s life cycle (www.lenovo.com).

If your needs are more basic, a simple solution to saving on energy costs and reducing impact to the environment is to utilize a laptop. Laptops are already generally more energy efficient than desktops. Some laptops listed on EPEAT’s website under the Gold category include Toshiba, Lenovo, Apple and Dell products. Depending on whether you are looking for a laptop that is ultra-portable or more of an all-purpose type notebook – according to PCWorld.com a couple of the most energy efficient in the EPEAT Gold category include Apple’s 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air and Dell Latitude E5510 (“Take Your Tech Off the Grid”).

Some of the newer ways to be green don’t even have anything to do with the product itself, but the actual packaging that arrives at your door. Dell is now using bamboo to package several products (including the Latitude laptops) and are shooting to use bamboo packaging in two-thirds of all portable devices by the end of 2011 (www.Dell.com). Another avenue companies are pursuing involves developing software to install on the product that will manage and effectively reduce energy consumption. For example, Power Assure just debuted its energy management software for Cisco blade servers that not only aims to reduce power consumption by 50%, but also improve performance and increase the life cycle of the server (www.PowerAssure.com).

Lucky for us, more energy efficient products than ever are being manufactured, which helps take some of the guess work out of the equation when searching for new technology products.