A company’s “green” program is just a cost center, and if it’s faced with a tight budget, it’s one of the first things that should get cut, right?

Maybe not.

Andrew Winston, author of the book Green Recovery, says companies that shelve their green strategies until the economy improves will miss huge opportunities to make their businesses stronger and more profitable.

Winston says this isn’t about climate change. It’s about decoupling U.S. business from dependence on carbon and oil.

And in the course of developing their green programs, Winston says companies have taken positions that would otherwise be considered heretical — except that they’re making money.

• Con-way, a shipping company, reduced the maximum speed for its trucks from 65 to 62 miles per hour. Who’d think that a shipping company would want to reduce speed? But Con-way saved nearly 3.2 million gallons of diesel fuel as a result.
• Pepsi/Tropicana looked at the life cycle of orange juice to determine what part of the tree-to-table process created the largest carbon footprint. Turns out it was the carbon content in fertilizer. The company switched to low-carbon fertilizer, even though it realized there was no way it could use this green solution in product marketing.
• UPS discovered it could save truck idling time — time when fuel was wasted — by mandating that its drivers make no left turns. It uses special GPS programs to plan routes. UPS has saved three million gallons of fuel per year as a result.
• Xerox recommended to its customers that they buy less equipment and use smarter networking. It has created a new facet of its business, but it’s simultaneously telling its customers, “Buy less of our product.” Xerox’s CEO said it was better for his company to do this rather than let someone else do it.

Winston suggests companies ask themselves two questions about their green programs:

1. What’s our heresy?
2. If we don’t do it, who else might?

(Winston spoke recently to a session at the American Society of Safety Engineers conference in Baltimore.)