Printing outfit Lexmark has come up with a wizard wheeze to save the planet. It is suggesting that people don’t use its products so much.

Lexmark International has created a web toolbar which gives people more ways to block web based images from being needed to come out of the printer, saving ink and paper. Lexmark's free program converts a web page into black and white for printing, extending the life of expensive colour ink cartridges. It also improves the "printer-friendly" features many sites offer. Often printer-friendly pages carry logos and other graphics; the Lexmark tools let you eliminate those as well.

A spokesman for Lexmark said that while it was losing cash on people not printing out stuff they didn’t want, it was making it all back with customer satisfaction. Most of the features work regardless of whether your printer was made by Lexmark, Hewlett-Packard or another rival.

The Firefox version lets you remove forms, links and other elements, too which is something the Internet Exploder version can't do.

More here.