The U.S. Postal Service is offering greener choices, and an easy, online resource for consumers to make environmentally friendly decisions about their mail.

From eco-friendly products and services to ideas for recycling and ways to help marketers create greener advertising, usps.com/green contains hundreds of facts, suggestions and programs to help improve environmental awareness and make it easier for consumers to go green — including a way to calculate carbon footprint savings by conducting Postal Service business online.

Almost anything a customer can do in a Post Office can be done online. The green web pages provide the extra benefit of one quick, easy and convenient location to learn how to be greener consumers. An easy-to-use navigation bar directs users to product, recycling, Postal Service environmental innovation, direct mail and ideas for greening mail, including links to local recycling centers, reusing boxes and packages for shipping, and ensuring home addressing is current to make sure consumers receive the mail they want and eliminate waste

JHG-Townsend is launching a green program “Virtual Fridays” that helps employees save on high gas prices and responds to the environmental challenges we all face. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, JHG-Townsend’s 35 employees will be working remotely on Fridays, utilizing the latest communication technologies, including Skype and Web conferencing, to connect and communicate instantly with each other, their clients and partners.

Retail gas prices are up nearly 10 percent from a month ago and have climbed more than 20 percent in the last 12 months. Using a Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator, JHG-Townsend found that by implementing “Virtual Fridays,” the company’s employees will save:

• 30 gallons of gas each week
• 420 gallons of gas during the entire summer program
• And, if 23 gallons are refined from one barrel of oil, the company will save 18 barrels of oil
• 3.64 Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide

eBay announces the opening of an environmentally friendly building on its North Campus in San Jose. It is the first building in San Jose to be built to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold standards for new construction, which is the second-highest LEED rating a building can receive. The building sits on a campus with the largest commercial solar installation in the city.

The campus has 3,248 solar panels covering 60,000 square feet - more than a football field - of roof supplying 18 percent of the campus’s power with a 650 kW system. With the largest commercial solar installation that is operational in San Jose, and because of its proximity to public transportation, eBay’s new building and campus reflect the close collaboration between the city and eBay to reduce its environmental footprint. City staff was instrumental in facilitating eBay’s move to this campus and ensuring flexibility to expand as the needs for the building and campus evolved.

Mannatech locally packs and ships its nutritional supplements and skin care products to consumers throughout the United States and Canada. Mannatech uses more than 20 tons of packaging monthly sending products throughout North America, where a majority of the company's 575,000 independent Associates and Members live.

Mannatech began using recycled corrugated boxes in November 2007. Annually, this move will save an estimated 4,000 trees, 980,000 gallons of fresh water, 735,000 kilowatt hours of energy and 610 cubic yards of landfill space -- resources that would have been used to make non-recycled boxing.

Everyone is going green. In the business world, rather than a band-aid for flagging corporate reputations, green business practices have become a legitimate wake-up call. More and more companies are attempting to enhance their corporate social responsibility ranking by providing sustainability reports, and developing ways to reduce their energy and paper consumption.

Nearly one thousand companies now publish sustainability reports—including about half of the S&P 100 corporations—up from zero just ten years ago. A powerful case study of big corporations finding environmental religion: retail giant Wal-Mart announced in 2005 that it would invest $500 million annually in energy saving technologies, reduce solid waste by 25% over the next three years, and urge sixty thousand suppliers to produce environmentally friendly goods.

A survey conducted by leading unified communications consultancy group ICUGlobal has revealed that, from a poll of 300 organisations, 7 out of 10 surveyed rated "reducing organisational carbon footprints" as a key driver in their organisation's decision to invest in web conferencing and collaboration.

The survey revealed that whilst organisations are constantly reviewing corporate travel and other communication practices for cost management reasons, the green debate is adding considerable impetus to web conferencing demand as this allows staff to meet visually, online without needing to leave their place of work.

Guidance unveiled a best-practices guide to help companies of any size operate as environmentally aware organizations and reduce or eliminate their carbon footprints. The guide includes strategies learned from the company’s own experience throughout its quest to help create a sustainable environment.

The report is a step-by-step guide helping companies evaluate their operations, calculate their carbon footprint and take action. It covers strategies for reducing or eliminating consumption of non-renewable resources like energy, paper and plastic, ideas for incorporating recycling programs, and suggests ways to offset the amount of carbon dioxide the company releases into the atmosphere through its activities.

Find out more and where to download the guide for free after the jump.

Intel will purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours a year of renewable energy certificates as part of a multi-faceted approach to reduce its impact on the environment, making Intel the single-largest corporate purchaser of green power in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The company said it hoped the record-setting purchase would help stimulate the market for green power, which should lead to additional generating capacity and ultimately, lower costs.

The purchase placed Intel at the top of EPA’s latest Green Power Partners Top 25 list, and also at the No. 1 spot on EPA’s Fortune 500 Green Power Partners list. The EPA’s Green Power Partnership program encourages and recognizes voluntary green power purchases as a way to reduce the impact of conventional electricity use.

More environmentally-friendly Verizon sedans are now on the road in New York state. Forty hybrid sedans will replace traditional gasoline-powered vehicles in Verizon's local fleet, for an estimated annual reduction in carbon emissions of 105 metric tons. Verizon is rolling out 100 new hybrid sedans in metropolitan areas across the country.

With engines that run on gasoline and electricity, hybrids are more fuel- efficient than vehicles equipped with traditional engines. The Toyota Prius sedans being added to Verizon's fleet can travel nearly double the miles per gallon and emit less than half of the carbon of most traditional sedans.

HP has formed relationships with renewable energy providers, SunPower Corp. in the United States and Airtricity in Ireland, as part of the company's strategy to reduce its global carbon footprint.

Under a power purchase agreement with SunPower, HP will install its first-ever, large-scale solar power installation at its San Diego facility.

HP's contract with Airtricity, a renewable energy company developing and operating wind farms across Europe and North America, is for the supply of renewable wind energy to a number of its facilities in Ireland for fiscal year 2008. The electricity supplied by Airtricity is generated by both onshore and offshore wind farms.

Google is starting a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The newly created initiative, coined the Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (or RE<C), will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies. Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work, which will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas. In 2008, Google expects to spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy projects which generate positive returns.

"We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers," said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. "We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal."

Jason’s Deli demonstrates its commitment to "going green" by unveiling its first “solar deli” at its Dowlen Road store in Beaumont. The Dowlen deli is the first of Jason’s 170 deli restaurants to be powered in part by solar energy, with more systems planned in the near future. NewPoint Energy Solutions, a Houston-based renewable energy company and a division of Standard Renewable Energy LP, designed and installed the 5.3-kilowatt solar electric system.

Jason’s 5.3 kilowatt solar array from NewPoint Energy Solutions will generate approximately 6,900 kilowatts of power per year for the Beaumont location. This equates to the annual equivalent of preventing 13,100 pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the earth’s atmosphere, or eliminating a day’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions from 400 cars. The system includes an in-store monitoring system where customers can see the amount of electricity being produced by the solar panels.