If vendors are trying to spread the word about their eco-friendly products, it's not reaching the ears of IT buyers. Which is just as well since only a minority of businesses has a formal set of criteria to govern their green purchasing decisions.

These topics are the focus of a Business Week article, It's Not Easy Buying Green, which dissects some of Forrester's recent findings.

Of 124 executives surveyed by Forrester, 85% said environmental concerns are "important." But only about one-fourth of companies have a formal procedure for considering green criteria when it comes to making purchases. "It's a distinct minority of buyers that are really putting the vendors through their paces in terms of the greenness of the products they are buying," says Christopher Mines, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report.

That's sure to change as vendors start beating the energy efficiency drum. For instance there's already 80 PLUS program which calls for boosting to 80 percent the power that's carried over during the AC/DC conversion process by power supplies (currently hovering around 60 percent).