Giants like Wal-Mart lead the way with efforts to control their emissions and aggressive policies for becoming sustainable.

Many companies have been making efforts to reduce their waste production and lower their energy costs.

With the rapid and volatile upward rise of energy over the last year, it seems like the onset of these programs was prophetic. The more sustainable a company can be the less money they spend on external sources of energy. That is certainly helping companies that already have a Go Green program in place.

There are, however, companies that come from humble origins and have made incredible strides towards sustainability. One example is a popular micro-brew based in Colorado that goes by the name of New Belgium. New Belgium is a very popular beer for the size and age of the company. They serve eighteen states, mostly in the Midwest and have three hundred employees. New Belgium produces more than five hundred million barrels of beer a year.

From humble beginnings, comes great success. This company was started by a couple that took a homebrew recipe into the mountains and sketched out how they wanted to operate their company.

Many of the facets of their company's mission involved environmental stewardship. This meant committing to sustainability early on and without ulterior motives for positive press or free advertisement. New Belgium was operating completely on wind power by 1998 and implementing practices that reduced outputs and increased the efficiency of their brewing process.

New Belgium has never really relied on this as a peg in their advertising promotions. Until recently, there wasn't a much of a positive connotation with going green and being environmentally friendly.

Nowadays, many people actually choose products based on their organic nature or their environmental friendliness. New Belgium continues to resist putting much of this in their advertisements, and instead help other companies create similar programs.

For your business, there are numerous online resources you can pull from to get ideas for becoming more green. One such site is http://www.thegreenguide.com/. They are a subsidiary of National Geographic and have a great online magazine that specializes on products and tips to help you lead a greener life. While they are mostly consumer driven, they can be applied to businesses in the same fashion.

Even Time magazine has a weekly column dedicated to the happenings of the green movement. This can be found at http://www.time.com/time/goinggreen.

All in all, going green isn't just a good move for your business and conscience. It is a smart business decision that can pay dividends in the face of rising energy costs.

With more EPA restrictions on the way, it is more cost effective to stay one step ahead of the game and avoid costly penalties and overhauls. Plus, it is the future that is at stake, and the future might catch up with us more quickly than we'd like.