If there's one, top-level truth about the state of green business, it's that no matter how much innovation companies are doing to reduce their impacts or improve the greenness of their products, it's that most individuals are not willing to pay more for a sustainable product.

So it's perhaps fitting that eBay was one of the companies on stage this morning at the third and final GreenBiz Forum in San Francisco. CEO John Donahoe took the stage this morning to discuss how a company that was not founded with green in mind has benefited from the green passions of its employees and users.

"[eBay founder] Pierre Omidyar did not found it as a green company, but as a way to connect buyers and sellers," Donahoe said. "And the story of eBay is the story of empowering a community and watching the community take the company in places no one would have guessed."

We've covered some of those innovations extensively on GreenBiz.com: First was the Cradle to Cradle-certified shipping box -- the first of its kind, developed in partnership with the U.S. Postal Service. Then came the 100 percent reusable shipping box. Next up: Instant Sale for used electronics, which aims to make it easier to keep gadgets out of landfills. And eBay also recently partnered with clothing maker Patagonia to encourage people to buy less, and buy used.

The connective tissue among all these projects is that they were generated by eBay's community of users, whether employees or users of the website.

"We had a green team come up organically in eBay," Donahoe said. "And now 2,400 people are part of it, and they're coming up with things that can make us more sustainable in our business model."

The partnership with Patagonia came from an eBay employee meeting a Patagonia employee at a business conference; the idea to install Bloom Energy fuel cell boxes on the company's campus was similarly employee-generated -- and now eBay gets 16 percent of its campus' energy use from renewables, thanks to the Bloom boxes.

eBay has benefited from the enthusiasm of its community of buyers and sellers -- Donahoe boasts 300,000 members of the Green.eBay.com site, and counts them all among members of his green team. And Donahoe said sellers and buyers are regularly sharing best practices for minimizing the impacts of shipping products purchased online.

Some of the ideas to come out of those suggestions include the Cradle to Cradle box, as well as the reusable shipping box.