Have you ever received an email with, "Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail" in the footer? Jason Kottke asks "Wonder where it came from?" A great question, indeed.

Since the meme spread via e-mail, it's impossible to look inside peoples inboxes and really see where it started. There's the usual blog posts discussing the subject, but even they didn't go back very far. So I used Google search and found a bunch of archived listserv e-mail archives. Jack pot!

February, 2007: Clear and Lane e-mail newsletter.
October 2, 2006: An email, [Pfclub] meeting on the 9th (this Sabbath).
August 14, 2006: In the footer of New Zealand Public Library job opening.
May 18, 2006: Mailing list email, Re: Internal remote repository setup in Maven 2.
April 19, 2006: In a Scholarship description for Media and Communication Studies.
November 8, 2005: Another techy email: Re: [iMS] Domain Keys and InFusion.
December 6, 2004: The oldest I could find - RE: Log4J in JSP Pages.

So we go all the back to 2004, with mostly technical listserv emails, and it looks like IT folks started this green meme. That seems to make sense, given the Al Gore invented the Internet / An Inconvenient Truth connection.

Besides never deleting emails, Mark Ontkush suggests Google without the white background. Simply putting your computer to sleep every night is supposed to help, too.

Check out more tips on how to go green at the office over at Green Daily.