When trash companies paint their trucks green, they don’t save the planet. They merely signal “we care” and make customers feel good.

Garbage collectors who genuinely care seek the rewards of turning trash into treasure — just as beverage-makers seek the financial rewards of recyclable cans.

The University of Colorado Colorado Springs should instill this knowledge when teaching the social and environmental ramifications of doing business. The UCCS College of Business will offer a new “social impact” minor starting in the fall. Students can learn to paint themselves green, or to make a real difference.

The college will do society a service by teaching students to achieve profits when they enter the business world. Honest profits in minimally regulated markets inherently improve the social and environmental conditions any “social impact” course should focus on.

Too often, young Americans hear that profits are evil, unjust, environmentally harmful — even racist. This leads them to believe good social stewardship involves apologizing for success and sacrificing profits. It just isn’t true.

To appreciate the fruits of profits, visit underdeveloped countries that don’t enforce universal rules for seeking them. In these regions, garbage lines the streets. Livestock leaves dung on sidewalks and playgrounds. Old cars, without modern emission controls, stir up dust on unpaved roads and cause brown clouds. Poverty, unlike profitable endeavors, wreaks social and environmental havoc.

In minimally regulated capitalist economies, things look different. Central planners are no match for the millions of daily, profit-driven transactions that shape free societies, demand environmental care and human kindness while raising the communal standard of living. Elusive profits pay for and encourage good social and environmental behavior.

Anyone who starts a business learns profits are a dream to strive for and an essential ingredient to long-term survival of the enterprise. Most startups fail. Among those that survive, profit typically starts as a sliver of cash exceeding overhead.

Achieving profit means reducing fuel consumption, and therefore harmful byproducts, however possible. It requires minimizing costs, maximizing output and letting nothing go to waste.

Craft brewers increase profits and output by selling spent grains to make healthy and popular energy bars. Sawmills use sawdust to make particle board. Utility companies use coal plant residue to make bricks they sell for profit.

To easily grasp the nexus between profits and stewardship, consider workers in the gig economy. Ride-share drivers who tool around in air conditioning waiting for passengers lose money and quit. Those who profit learn to pull over and turn off the engine when no one is paying them to drive. The need for income to exceed overhead forces the reduction of their carbon footprints, whether they love Mother Earth.

To get this message across, new “social impact” and ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) curriculums throughout the country might teach a bit from Karl Marx, within responsible contexts. A leading critic of capitalism, Marx explained how profit greedily incentivizes the reuse of resources. At the time, the environment was an afterthought.

“The capitalist mode of production extends the utilisation of the excretions of production and consumption,” Marx wrote. Reuse, he said, “reduces the cost of the raw material to the extent to which it is again saleable” and, therefore, “increases pro tanto the rate of profit.”

Marx told of machine manufacturers repurposing metal filings to produce for-profit iron tools. He told of apparel plants recycling scraps, meaning consumers have “greatly benefited in being able to purchase cloth of a fair and average quality at a very moderate price.”

Marx believed capitalism exploited workers, which does not hold up. Yet, he fully understood the link between profits and stewardship.

Much like profit motives reward good environmental practices, they tend to dissuade social injustice and other irrational behaviors any “social impact” student must learn about.

Hard-core market-based racism required regulation, in the form of Jim Crow laws and the authoritarian segregation of sports leagues, schools and more. During a shameful and ignorant era of American history, market regulation codified discrimination to limit the threat of competitive interference from kinder, more rational profit seekers. Without unjust regulations to protect injustice, profit motives shred it to ribbons.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, other deregulatory moves and social sophistication have made injustice expensive — as it should be.

Judging or excluding customers or employees on a basis of race, religion, nationality, creed, sexual orientation, gender or other personal traits typically costs profit seekers that thin margin separating victory from defeat. Customers, potential employees and trade partners — more so than the law — punish injustice.

Nothing motivates good social and environmental stewardship more than the desire and need to achieve profits. The desire for profit has far more power than feel-good intentions and painting things green.

We hope prospective business leaders — the future of society — learn how profits earned fairly are a constant force for social progress and positive change. Let it begin at UCCS.