IBM is promoting mainframes as energy efficient. Sure, the thought of a towering, power-sipping system Z seems laughable, but hear them out.

Big Blue is planning a huge consolidation project, replacing thousands of servers -- 3,900 to be exact -- with a total of 30 mainframes by employing a magic combo of virtualization and Linux. All those servers will be recycled, so no worries there. IBM anticipates 80 percent savings on electricity over five years under the new setup.

The data centers involved are sprinkled across the globe: Poughkeepsie, New York; Southbury, Connecticut; Boulder, Colorado; Portsmouth, UK; Osaka, Japan; and Sydney, Australia.

Leading by example, nice!

Unfortunately, no eco-kudos for office laser printers. It turns out that they are toner spewers, blackening your lungs while earning a day's wage.

A study conducted in Australia revealed that some printers, mostly HPs, were contributing substantially to indoor air pollution. It's a bit more complex than singling out a single model or product line, however. Factors such as the age of the toner cartridge and coverage (the area of paper that receives toner) seem to be influences.

And before you bombard me with comments *crickets, tumbleweeds*, the images above are obviously not to scale. You'd break your back shaking the toner cartridge on that thing!