5. USPS Saves $5 Million Annually With Transportation Consolidation
By GreenBiz Staff

The U.S. Postal Service made headlines when it announced it saved a whopping $10 million in two years by deploying a transportation optimization system that helps consolidate trips. Its Highway Corridor Analytics Program (HCAP), developed with IBM, analyzes operations, loads and routes to determine the best way to deliver mail while saving gas and money.

4. The Balanced Scorecard and Corporate Social Responsibility: Aligning Values for Profit
By David Crawford and Todd Scaletta

First published in October of 2005, this article is the graybeard among the bunch. In it, the authors offer up an overview of the benefits for corporate reporting, something that we've seen is steadily on the rise: in our annual State of Green Business report, we find a steady rise among U.S.-based FT500 or S&P 500 companies that are filing corporate CSR reports.

3. Top 8 Ways to Go Green on the Cheap
By Sarah Fister Gale

If there was a story perfectly attuned to these times, this story from our contributing writer Sarah Fister Gale is it. In a time when corporate budgets for all kinds of projects are on the chopping block, Sarah looks at the ways that companies can make a big impact with little up-front payment. The best part of these kinds of projects is that they often serve to whet the appetite: when your business sees easy improvements to the bottom line by going green, bigger, more ambitious projects are sure to follow. (Appropriately enough, Sarah also covered these types of projects, in a story that ranked #12 on the most-popular list, Taking Green Initiatives to the Next Level.)

2. California Adopts Green Building Code for All New Construction
By Leslie Guevarra

As California goes, so goes the nation, and when the Golden State passed a new, soon-to-be-mandatory green building code, readers checked in to see not just what would happen to buildings in the country's most populous state, but also how that would presumably begin to affect the rest of the country's plans for green buildings.

1. The New Green Focus for Future MBAs
By Padma Nagappan

Far and away our most popular story this year (Drudge-related traffic notwithstanding), this article explored the ways business schools are responding to and shaping demand for sustainability education.

Padma's piece showed how students are clamoring to bring sustainability into MBA programs that are not green from the get-go, and the article highlighted the ways that business schools are helping to shape the future of business by bringing green ideas to new realms of study. On top of that, what better retreat from a bad economy than to go back to school for a couple years and come out when times are better?

For all the economic turmoil we're enduring on a day-to-day basis, the stories we're covering every day on GreenBiz.com and our sister sites show that interest in corporate responsibility and sustainability is not waning. In fact, as more and more business leaders see the many benefits of going green -- not the least of which is of course the substantial cost savings from improved efficiency -- we expect to see steadily bigger and better stories come from the halls of the corporate world.

Finally, a hearty thanks to all of our readers for making 2008 a successful year, and here's looking ahead to a greener 2009.