IT manufacturers can cut production costs, open new markets and gain a competitive edge by building systems that maximize energy use, minimize materials and can be reused to the greatest extent possible.

Yet despite reporting every day on the benefits of energy efficient technology and applying IT's measuring, monitoring and management capabilities to every business practice, the vast majority of green IT projects stop at the implementation level, rather than digging deeper to the design level.

So why aren't more firms looking at Design for Environment (DfE) principles?

"There's a lack of knowledge and education, and [DfE] is being driven by regulation," Mike Kirschner, the president of Design Chain Associates, explained in a recent phone conversation. "A lot of companies have blinders on -- they're focused on compliance and that's the end of it."

In some ways, it's fortunate that companies are at least thinking about it, even if it's only when they're forced to do so by laws like Europe's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directives. The move toward greener practices in IT equipment parallels the evolution over the last 20 years of green business practices in general: Moving from green for compliance's sake to green for the environmental, economic and strategic benefits it offers.

Design Chain Associates is partnering with Technology Forecasters, Inc. to present a 90-minute webinar on DfE principles on April 7 to bring the ideas and practices home to IT professionals, especially those working at small- to medium-sized businesses.

Pamela Gordon, the president and founder of TFI, literally wrote the book on DfE in electronics back in 2001, but since Lean and Green: Profit for Your Workplace and the Environment was published, surprisingly little has changed in companies' attitudes toward DfE.

"I'm just sometimes still surprised about how slowly DfE is getting adopted at companies," Gordon told me last week. "DfE principles have been available for some time, and I think it really is the [responsibility of] executive management at electronics companies. They can do a better job of requiring of their designers certain thresholds of environmental attributes that get passed to R&D and engineering managers and to the engineers themselves."

Kirchner agrees that leadership on green electronics design has to come from the top levels of a company, and sees progress at least in the awareness that the industry as a whole now knows just how little it understands about designing with the environment in mind.

The webinar takes place twice on April 7, once aimed at East Coast and European audiences (at 7 AM Pacific Time), and once aimed at West Coast and Asian audiences (at 4:00 PM Pacific Time). And a key element of the 90-minute event focuses on a checklist for DfE practices and principles that attendees can put to work "the very next day," Gordon said.

The slow adoption of DfE in tech companies is not due to a lack of interest or concern about environmental problems, but the aforementioned lack of awareness and leadership from executives.