Companies trying to be green are coming up with enough colorful comparisons to cover the Amazon River basin-twice. In November, Xerox announced that since 1991 it had reused or recycled a total of 2 billion pounds of spent toner cartridges, outmoded printers and such - enough waste, it said, to fill more than 160,000 garbage trucks, stretching more than 1,000 miles, from Seattle to the Mexican border. The Environmental Protection Agency says that, in 2006, the electronics manufacturers and retailers that have joined its ‘Plug into eCycling’ program had, by collecting and recycling ink cartridges and machines, saved enough electricity to power more than 7,000 homes. And today Hewlett-Packard said that in 2007 alone it recycled 250 million pounds of hardware and printer cartridges - the equivalent of ‘more than double the weight of the Titanic.’ It makes one almost nostalgic for the hackneyed ‘the length of ten football fields’ comparison. But behind the descriptions is a real race among electronics companies to how how serious they are about going green. It has never been easy. The design tricks printer companies have used to make it harder for outsiders to refill their cartridges has also […]