Montana's state government recycles 700,000 pounds of office paper every year. State workers write with pens made from recycled plastic and type on computers made without the toxins already illegal in Europe.

So Montana is doing pretty good, said Scot Case, a Pennsylvania-based consultant on "green purchasing," but the state could still do better.

Case was in Helena Thursday to train the procurement officers of all state agencies, along with some federal, local and private procurement officers on how to think green when placing the enormous orders typical of government.

His training was part of a week-long project of the state Department of Administration and Department of Environmental Quality to drive home ways of saving energy -- and money -- in state government.

Some states, like New York, have mandates that equipment, supplies and services purchased by the state must take into account the environmental and social cost of what the state buys, Case said.

Montana doesn't do that, said Sheryl Olson, deputy director of the Department of Administration, but for years, managers have challenged workers to buy energy efficient equipment and other durable goods. This spring, the state challenged its workers to buy more recycled and green office products.

The effort is part of Governor Schweitzer's 20x10 Energy Initiative to reduce energy use in state government by 20 percent by the year 2010.

Already, Olson said, 72 percent of all the paper bought by the state is recycled. State documents are printed with toxin-free inks.

Such efforts don't cost the state any more money, said Olson and other state procurement specialists. The recycled pens, for example, cost the same as regular pens, said Sandra Boggs, of the Air, Energy and Pollution Prevention Bureau at DEQ.

And the toxin-free computers are actually cheaper than normal computers said Brad Sanders, who heads up computer buying for the Department of Administration, because Montana is one of 37 other Western states that buy the computers in enormous quantities from suppliers.

Case said it's no accident that prices of recycled and lower-impact products are coming down. State procurement is a big part of the explanation. Government buys such enormous volumes of paper, pens, ink and other office products that it drives down the price.

"We're the consumer," he told the procurement buyers. "We're always right."

He compared the combined purchasing power of government as equivalent to the economic might of the Hudson Bay Co., the Canadian company that began as fur-trading business along the U.S.-Canadian border and grew into a retail empire.

Even something as small as buying recycled printer paper makes a difference, Case said. Recycled paper uses 95 percent less energy that making paper out of virgin trees.

"If everyone in the world lived like we do," he said, referring to the resources and energy needed to maintain the American way of life, "we would need at least five more planets."

But case cautioned the purchaser not to fall for "green" products that cost a lot more than traditional products or don't work as well. In those cases, he said, you're not talking about green products, but expensive and shoddy products.

He said the state could do simple things, like build into its contracts for janitorial services a mandate that cleaners use products that don't contain toxins.