Earth Day was created 40 years ago to raise awareness and appreciation for the Earth and our collective impact on it. The Earth is pretty big, so it’s no wonder that it is such a big, diverse topic. Whether it’s the conservationists, the off-the-grid / energy independence voices, the LOHAS / organics and personal health folks, the always popular 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), the think global / buy local voices, the global warming / climate change folks — everyone has an opinion and everyone is using this day as a platform for their agenda. So, why not corporations?

Corporations have a huge role to play in the environment. The goods they manufacture and sell to consumers require a lot of natural resources – like oil, water, metals, rare earth minerals, wood, and more. The very nature of their global supply chains means that the social impacts as well as environmental impacts can be enormous for consumers to actually comprehend. And, when the ‘hippie culture’ started to give way to the disco scene, Earth Day needed to raise awareness to achieve their goals. Raising awareness requires marketing, which until the age of social media, required money.

I’ve always imagined that was the dawn of the tenuous relationship between environmentalists and business. Since I consider myself part of both camps, I recall being outraged in the 90’s attending an Earth Day festival that was ginning up ungodly volumes of waste with no recycling bins to be found. And, the untold businesses represented in tradeshow style booths handing out squishy rubber desk toys with their logos promoting excessive consumption of ridiculous products. To me, that was rock bottom.

But it was about then that companies started to pull back from Earth Day, the icon of greenwashing. Hearing backlash from employees and customers, they started to really absorb what they were doing wrong. And, some of them even engaged in real conversation with environmentalists. And, some even realized that many of the changes prescribed were actually going to save them money, making their businesses more profitable as well as more marketable.

In the last decade, we’ve seen the advent of words like zero waste, sustainable business, life-cycle analysis, green supply chain and triple bottom line metrics tracking social, environmental and financial viability of companies. Those phrases aren’t consumer-oriented phrases. They are directed at a business-to-business audience that is focused on how to steer the giant economy and the companies that lead it away from the iceberg.

The companies leading the charge should benefit from green marketing messages. But, treating Earth Day like another Hallmark-holiday is not an authentic move (great article from AdAge for those in the green marketing business http://adage.com/article?article_id=126362). Companies (and the employees and consumers that direct their choices), will have to be vigilant against greenwashing. At RecycleMatch, we’ve talked to Fortune 100 customers who have told us that they are using it as an internal-facing communications opportunity, sparking discussion and debate internally as to how to improve their triple bottom lines.

At RecycleMatch, like most leading businesses working on sustainability issues, we focus on making the business ecosystem more efficient with our natural resources every day. For Earth Day, we are focused on supporting groups like www.350.org and www.earthday.org who are getting people involved at a grass-roots level on environmental issues. And, we are challenging ourselves personally to do just a little more this year than we did last year.

If you would like to learn more, make a donation, or register as a member of these great organizations, check out their web sites – 350.org and http://www.earthday.org/take-action.