In this paper we generalize the Green–Kubo method (usually used for obtaining formulas for transport coefficients involving conserved densities) to relaxation processes occurring during collisions, such as the transfer of energy from vibrational to translational modes in a molecular fluid. We show that the relaxation rate can be calculated without evaluating time correlation functions over long times, and can in fact be written as a sum over collisions which makes the relation between the Green–Kubo method and approximate independent-collision models much clearer.