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Attendees listen to one of the first sessions at Opportunity Green 2009, held on the campus of UCLA.

Everybody wants them to be together so bad. But environmental sustainability and successful business models still seem to find only minimal overlap, coming together briefly then bouncing apart like the positively charged ends of magnets. Switching the poles is likely just a matter of time. The people on the environmental side can’t wait for it to happen. Neither can the people on the business side. But it’s the emerging field of people on both sides who are actually making that switch happen.

Many of them are in L.A. right now for Opportunity Green, a business conference focused on environmental sustainability and the nebulous idea of “green”. Despite the difficulty of splicing the altruistic principles of earth-mindedness into a market driven by profit and competition, a broad range of business people are challenging the longstanding idea that good for the environment means bad for business.

From huge multinational corporations to startup 501(c)3s, the concept of sustainability is increasingly being embraced in the day-to-day world of business operations. Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review, described to the first-day crowd at Opportunity Green about the survey his editorial team conducted of 2,000 business executives worldwide to find out what efforts they were making to green their businesses. What they found was a fairly widespread acceptance of the emerging role of sustainability in business. Some are still approaching the idea trepidatiously, according to the survey, which found that 70% of those businesses had not developed a valid business case for investing in sustainability measures. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“That, my friends, is an opportunity,” said Hopkins. “These trends are going to change how people manage, whether they care about sustainability or not.”

The inevitability of the green movement was a recurring theme throughout the day. Len Sauers, vice president for global sustainability at Proctor & Gamble, explained how reducing a variety of minor inefficiencies across his company’s supply chain multiplied into savings of millions of dollars. Reducing this waste - or “going sustainable” — turned out to be the best business decision. Rather than being tacked on, sustainability is becoming more of an embedded part of business.

These are just a few of the ways traditional businesses are reconsidering the way they operate. The general feeling at Opportunity Green is that this is a trend that’s only beginning, and that being green is soon to be the status quo.

There’ll be more to come tomorrow as Day Two of Opportunity Green unfolds. We’ll also get into more of the specific green projects people are undertaking and the new technologies they are using to increase the profitability of the green movement.