IT firm Toshiba has today launched a service that will allow customers buying any of the company's laptops to offset the carbon emissions associate with the manufacture and use of the product.

The company said that customers would be given the option to make their laptops "carbon zero" by donating £1.18 at the time of purchase to a dedicated tree planting scheme in Cumbria managed by Toshiba's offset partners co2balance.

Tom Nickson, environmental manager at Toshiba, said that the scheme complemented the company's strategy of developing more environmentally friendly and low-carbon products and pointed to the low cost of the offsets as evidence of the progress already made in limiting the energy consumed in the manufacture and use of its laptops.

Mark Simpson, director of co2balance, also moved to allay environmentalists' concerns that the inability to predict the lifetime of a tree makes forestry projects a particularly ineffective means of offsetting carbon emissions.

"All the trees are planted on land which we own and which we manage ourselves," he said. "This ensures that we have control over the trees, in order to ensure that every one planted can absorb carbon dioxide and help combat climate change. The scheme is also a totally 'additional' project, which means that the trees would not otherwise have been planted but for the investment of Toshiba’s customers."

The scheme is the latest in a long line of offsetting services from IT companies. Most notably, Dell launched a major campaign entitled Plant a Tree For Me earlier this year that offers customers the chance to offset the emissions associated with using Dell products.

In separate news, computer giant HP today announced it had inked two new renewable energy deals as it seeks to hit its target of cutting energy use by 20 per cent by 2010. The company said it had signed a deal with SunPower in the US that will see the company install a large-scale solar power installation at its San Diego facility, and agreed a contract with Irish renewables firm Airtricity that will see 90 per cent of HP's energy use in Ireland come from wind power.