Sustainability has the potential to greatly enhance your company's top line. In other words, green business practices can impact your revenue (and corresponding business value) in a number of important and tangible ways, such as:

• Enhancing your market share through innovation: Applying sustainable principles to the product design process often leads to identifying entirely new product lines to bring to market. For example, thinking deeply about environmental and social principles while engaging in product research and development (R&D) may lead your office furniture company to consider using organic, hemp, or other plant-based textiles. This entirely new product line may open up new markets and expand your thoughts to even more fresh and creative potential.

Innovating to solve problems is also a key component of sustainable product design. For example, when a textile firm's foreign supplier could no longer produce dyes because of European Union environmental regulations, the firm developed an alternative, nontoxic color palette that's now one of its strongest product lines.

• Bringing the look and feel of nature into your product: The idea that merging biological principles with product design is a visionary way to incorporate the lessons nature has already learned in nearly four billion years of evolution and adaptation is receiving more and more recognition these days. That's why you can now find adhesives that are as strong as mollusk shells, binding agents as tough as a spider's web, and buildings with underground chambers like termite mounds for natural cooling.

• Identifying massive markets in the developing world: Still another opportunity for green product development resides in meeting the basic needs of much of the developing world. The market for water purification, environmentally benign household products, efficient fuels, and high-yield foods is astronomical in the Third World.

• Creating a competitive advantage by differentiating yourself: Although the proliferation of companies that are self-identifying as green has grown by leaps and bounds recently, you still have tremendous opportunity to separate yourself from the pack through your green business practices and sustainable product offerings. Being completely truthful about your effort with product R&D, operational changes, and corporate value shift makes you credible to your customers. As consumers become more green-savvy, they'll continue to ferret out companies that greenwash (state that they're green without taking the actions necessary to back up that statement) - and make those companies pay the price for it through lost revenue.

• Facilitating closed-loop customer relationships: Today's consumers are increasingly interested in developing and maintaining relationships with companies that show a commitment to corporate social responsibility. Early sustainability advocates, such as Patagonia and The Body Shop, have built fanatically loyal customer bases. Survey after survey continues to indicate that Americans take corporate citizenship and sustainable product attributes into account when making purchasing decisions.

Learn about bettering your bottom-line and how sustainable business practices can foster a desirable workplace for top-notch employees.