There's good news this week on the green business front: Budgets and hiring in corporate environmental departments are on the rise. Those are core findings of the twice-annual "Green and the Economy" survey conducted by our GreenBiz Intelligence unit. While the overall economy still seems shaky, corporate environmental and sustainability departments seem to be on much more solid ground.

One big finding of our mid-year 2010 survey is that "the economic downturn is no longer driving most large companies’ environmental strategy," as my colleague, John Davies, vice president of GreenBiz Intelligence, writes this week. That means environmental initiatives are being driven more on the basis of strategic business decisions, as they should be. Chief among them, Davies found, is that "the economic downturn has taken a backseat to growing customer requirements as the principal driver of corporate environmental strategy."

Hiring is up, too. Large companies, in particular, are increasing headcounts for environmental and sustainability roles. In early 2009, 27 percent of large companies reported hiring freezes and only 8 percent planned to increase headcount for environmental departments. Today, only 11 percent report hiring freezes and more than 28 percent plan to increase headcount, a major swing.

Are we out of the woods? Of course not. The global economy is far from sure-footed. And environmental/sustainability roles inside companies should never be taken for granted. Green business professionals must continually prove their value, not just in keeping the company out of trouble, or even in saving them money. Today, to succeed, they must be catalysts for added value: new products, processes, services, and business models. All of which are more possible now, as companies emerge from survival mode.

Walmart, One Year Later: Last Friday marked one year since Walmart announced its Sustainability Index, an effort to assess products on a life cycle basis, as well as a set of questions it asked of companies in its massive supply chain. What's happened since? A little ... and a lot. I pick up the story in a blog post that looks at what's happened in the intervening 12 months -- and what hasn't.

Minding Your Waste: We've just launched registration for our forthcoming July 29 webinar on "Getting to Zero: How Companies Profit from Eliminating Waste," which will take a deep (dumpster) dive into how companies are getting to zero-waste operations. The session, which I'll be moderating, will look at the case of a Caterpillar plant in Illinois that is working towards this milestone, and will discuss with Jim Hall of Waste Management what it means -- and what it takes -- to be "zero waste." You can register for this free online event here.

Two of the world's most influential reporting schemes are aligning their goals and methods, and this report spells out the path forward.

Which materials can be claimed as pre-consumer recycled content -- and which definitely can't? UL Environment has developed this white paper to provide clarity about guidelines to validate claims of pre-consumer recycled content and to serve as a reference for manufacturers.

Join Waste Management’s Jim Hall and Caterpillar’s Jim Blass in conversation with Joel Makower, Executive Editor of GreenBiz.com, in an exploration of how companies are achieving zero waste. You’ll hear a first-hand account of Caterpillar’s pursuit of zero waste at its facility in Aurora, Illinois, and insight into the bottom-line impacts of a typical zero-waste program.