The State Of Green Business Report helps cut through "greenwashing" to see which sectors are really making progress.The editors at Greenbiz.com released their "State of Green Business 2008" report last week, tracking U.S. businesses in their environmental progress. The results proved both promising and worrisome on several fronts.

Overall, businesses are progressing slowly in their efforts to be more green, but some are moving at a much faster pace than others. Green building projects, for example, have proliferated along with clean technology investments toward renewable energy, waste reduction and resource management. The report qualified some issues, such as pesticide use on U.S. farms, as improving but at a rate too slow to counteract the magnitude of problems we face.

At the same time, the report deemed the issue of carbon emissions as "sinking". The United States still leads in both overall greenhouse gas emissions as well as per-capita emissions.

The report ultimately concludes that businesses are becoming more green, as companies learn the value of integrating environmental thinking into their operations. In addition, green business has shifted from a movement to a market, but much more work needs to be done.