Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced a suite of products and programs aimed and reducing the amount of paper and energy offices use in their daily operations, especially in their printing practices.

The announcements are aimed at promoting HPs new green products to customers, and helping them make the most environmentally friendly choices possible.

HP's Eco-Solutions line includes a new green label, called Eco Highlights, which identifies the environmental attributes of a product or service -- from energy use to duplex-printing features to end-of-life recyclability of the products. The first products included under the label are the LaserJet P4510 and P4015 series of printers and the DeskJet D2545 printer.

The D2545 printer was also announced yesterday by HP. With over 80 percent of the product's plastic made from recycled material, it is the company's most recyclable printer, and the cartridges it uses are molded from recycled plastic resins. On top of that, the overall packaging for the printer is fully recyclable; the printer is qualified for Energy Star certification; and it comes with HP's Smart Web Printing technology, which saves paper by combining on one sheet the portions of websites that would otherwise take up a full page of paper. The company also plans to introduce another green printer this summer that uses HP's closed-loop plastic recycling process.

Other announcements by HP yesterday include a carbon footprint calculator that gauges the energy use of a company's existing printers, as well as a LaserJet power calculator to compare the energy used by older HP printers with newer, more energy efficient products.

In addition to products and tools, HP also made several environmental commitments yesterday, pledging to recycle more than 250 million printer cartridges this year as part of its goal to recover 2 billion pounds of e-waste by 2010, increase the recycled content used in its printers by 300 percent in the next two years, and boost the energy efficiency of its printers by 40 percent before 2011.

HP also pledged to use by 2009 only photo paper that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forestry Certifications and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. Furthermore, the company aims to cut the packaging needed for its high-end printers in half by reducing total packaging per product and incorporated new and different kinds of packaging materials.

Full details about HP's Eco-Solutions announcements is online at http://www.hp.com/environment.