I'm returning to a recent topic - that of print and paper's environmental image - and make no apologies for doing so. My New Year post about the WWF-based aggravation resulted in a comment from John Roche, who pointed out that non-paper based products are quite happy to advertise "without a conscience", yet we in print and paper jump through all sorts of hoops and spend time and money on myriad environmental accreditations.

I totally agree that it's a crazy and unfairly skewed situation, but we are where we are. Perhaps instead of promoting positive messages such as "print grows trees" we could go on the attack and opt for "go ask Google for its carbon footprint" instead? Or highlight the unacceptable face of recycling by including a distressing picture of African children sorting through toxic piles of scrapped computers as an email sign-off.

I seem to recall there is an upcoming requirement for large companies to provide mandatory reports on carbon emissions as part of the Climate Change Act. But this is an EU thing so whether it will apply to the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of this world I'm not sure. Something radical needs to change if the population at large is to in any way grasp the magnitude of the vast network of power-hungry server farms that enable the interweb.

Some sort of compulsory on-screen carbon-ometer device showing the average daily power consumption and worldwide carbon footprint of the site, to appear on the world's top 1,000 websites, would be helpful for a start. No normal person is going to set aside their internet activities in order to scratch around looking for data centre info (as I did this morning), and then try and get their head around this sort of information from Facebook.