Environmental Sustainability
Why Green Is So Cool
Let's concentrate on environmental sustainability, even though sustainability has many other positive implications.
When we build our community, environmental sustainability in development practices can reduce energy consumption, pollution, and material use. Consumption and waste production are best measured over the life cycle of a building or project.
Older community members will remember green the first time it was chic. Sometimes they're cynical about whether the current green movement will last.
So you need to be prepared to explain how environmental sustainability is relevant at the community or neighborhood level:
1. Pollution affects human health and mental health. Your neighborhood should care about both.
2. Energy demand, together with supply, determines energy cost. In turn, energy costs impact where people can live and work--important community development considerations.
3. Solid waste generation leads to noisy, street-destroying garbage trucks at the least. Litter is an ongoing and increasing problem. The visual prominence of dumpsters or roll-out containers can be an issue. If you're a typical community, what you throw away ends up in a sanitary landfill.
4. Construction or demolition debris is a larger part of the solid waste stream than you might imagine (15-20% in many locales). Many commercial buildings erected in the last 20 years were built with a short life expectancy, leading us to think that the percentage of building materials in the waste stream will climb. Building materials can have a substantial impact on both pollution and energy demand too. And we just decided it's worthwhile to curb both.
5. The new industries that clean energy and sustainabable building practices could bring to your community could be just what you need for economic development.
6. Reducing your carbon footprint as a government, neighborhood, or community could help slow global climate change. And if you're coastal or in a climate you like now, that could become very important, don't you think?
That’s why we’re talking about environmental sustainability on a community development website.
Now that we’ve set the stage, we’ll give mostly brief sketches of the information you can find through the links contained in the narrative.
Environmental Sustainability in Development and Building Practices
The definition of sustainable development includes using less of the materials that Mother Nature took an era to produce. Choose materials that will last a long time, and that won't produce toxic effects during their use or pollute when they are disposed of. Ideally, the next use is built right into the building, or to say that another way, think about incorporating some versatility in case your intended use becomes obsolete in 30 years.
Sometimes it's location that creates environmental sustainability. Transit oriented development is a very important example.
Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
If you can reduce, re-use, and recycle, your neighborhood promotes environmental sustainability.
1. Reduce
It may be easiest to think about reducing. Examples are water conservation, energy conservation, and reduced use of paper. Your neighborhood or community organization probably will want to incorporate some of these reduction measures in your programming.
Just try to make sure that you're thinking clearly about environmental sustainability and not simply adopting clichés. Connect the dots for folks. If you stop using foam cups at board meetings, that's a little less garbage lying undigested in sanitary landfills somewhere.
But actually we think waste reduction has become a feasible goal for individual neighborhoods, and for a coalition of neighborhoods within a metropolitan area. Zero waste or closed-loop cities seemed so pie-in-the-sky until we started investigating. Check it out.
Less obviously, we need to reduce the polluted runoff that drains rapidly into our storm inlets, tributaries, and streams. Why? Because the stormwater runoff carries with it all the pollutants that were on the solid surfaces on the way to a larger body of water. So while your kids think that the water runs down the gutter, down the driveway, down to the end of the block, and then it disappears underground, we adults know that it reappears somewhere in a creek or river. Don’t we?
The other part of the stormwater runoff equation is that by reducing the speed at which the water runs off, we allow some of it to percolate (yes, that's the actual term) into the soil to replenish the groundwater. Many places rely on groundwater for their drinking water. And lastly, if we discourage stormwater from gushing away rapidly from hard surfaces that do not allow water to soak through (impervious surfaces), we diminish the opportunity for flash flooding.
2. Re-Use
Maybe a building is in such bad condition that it doesn't scream re-use. It just screams. Occasionally a building will be so obsolete or so dilapidated that it just needs to be demolished. If so, face that fact, and convince your government or the owner to take down the building. Developers and potential investors in other parts of the neighborhood are more receptive to a blank slate than to an old building that you've determined can't be saved.
When you have vacant land, or demolish a building, you now have a redevelopment opportunity. If you are able to replace that building with sustainable development or open space, you have a net increase in your neighborhood's desirability.
This website includes special sections on redevelopment of downtowns, waterfronts, and shopping centers.
Sometimes it's considerably more expensive to re-use a building than to construct something new, if you consider only the bottom line. That's why the notion of the triple bottom line has come into being. Basically the idea is that social and environmental costs need to be combined with the financial cost to figure out what is profitable.
Let's say that a building is perfectly sound structurally, but it is unlikely to be occupied for its previous use. So what to do? A service station can become an oil change place, using some of the same infrastructure. Or after you’ve removed the gasoline tanks (the most expensive part of gas station re-use), you can try for a deli, small restaurant, repair shop, or small store of any description.
When you have an empty building previously used for something not in demand, look at what is in demand in your neighborhood.
If there are environmental clean-up issues, address those first. Any place where petroleum products have been used, including gas stations, mechanic shops, dry cleaners, and most manufacturing, will automatically have an environmental regulatory issue. It will be called a brownfield. Your organization and local government can apply to your state for clean-up money.
Just to be clear, this isn't a clean-up your group can do on the weekend. This is the moon suit kind of clean-up. So you need some level of government probably.
If there are ordinary clean-up issues, address those too. Clean up the lot. Clean up the grime. If this building has some cheap aluminum siding on it, peel it off. Like any real estate, if it's painted the world's ugliest pink, try a soft beige.
3. Recycle
Many of us have been recycling for years. The recycling center is almost dead, now that most states have a mandatory waste reduction program that can be met only through curbside recycling. But waste reduction is where neighborhoods can step up by making sure that their events produce as little waste as possible, that events provide on-the-spot recycling bins, and that waste reduction receives as much attention as possible.
One pocket of recycling that would provide significant environmental, energy, and economic benefit is construction material recycling. We think it deserves more attention.
Electronics recycling not only reduces the volume of the local waste stream, but also removes heavy metals from it.
Transportation Alternatives
Another part of environmental sustainability that is quite important is retrofitting or developing a community so that it's
walkable and bikeable.
What? You thought walking somewhere for transportation was a sign you lost your driver’s license? Not so. It's good exercise, and it's virtually free, especially if you forego the most expensive walking shoes.
Biking and walking can minimize the environmental damage from cars, not to mention the damage from that little geopolitical thing with oil. Maybe you still think bikes are for kids or competitive young people in tight pants. But adults are increasingly enjoying this childhood taste of freedom. And safe places to ride increase bicycling.
Bikes get you somewhere in a reasonable amount of time, provide good exercise, and are inexpensive to maintain and run. More importantly for urban communities, accommodating bikes gets the message out that this is a safe place to be. And bike facilities increase your cool factor for attracting young people.
A public transit system is another key piece in environmental sustainability. So anything you can do to increase ridership, cleanliness, reliability, and convenience of buses, trains, on-demand service, or car services is very helpful.
Car Sharing
But there are also better ways to have access to cars, and a neighborhood can become quite desirable now by providing a few shared cars. Most of us think that's un-American, because after all we have to have our soda pop, tissues, chewing gum, maps to places we never go, toys, snacks, music CDs, and a hundred other things in "our" car.
But if you calculate the cost of taxes, insurance, maintenance, and operation of a vehicle, you might be singing a different tune. What if you had a combination that allowed you to unlock a car that was parked just down the block? You could drive it, and it would automatically record how far you went and bill your credit card. This is becoming popular in cities, but it could work well in small towns also. The goal is to reduce the number of cars people feel compelled to own.
Reducing the number of cars contributes to environmental sustainability not only by reducing air pollution, but also by reducing the energy required to produce the car and the solid waste produced by the car's ultimate demise.
Neighborhood Solar, Energy Conservation, and Such
Great neighborhood-scale energy projects now are becoming feasible. That could be the neighborhood windmill for a few of you, or negotiating group rates on solar installations, especially where your state laws are favorable.
We all need to ask for a smart grid
so we can generate electricity and sell it back to the utility, but while we're doing that, a few communities might want to go for the big project. Adding an energy generation component of environmental sustainability in a few densely populated neighborhoods could provide welcome relief to the power grid.
But for most of you, the most feasible action lies in energy conservation. There's a wealth of information available, but our page gives tips to start your discussion. We emphasize community-related energy conservation including transportation practices.
Local Food
Because of the negative impact of transportation on environmental sustainability, many people are getting on the bandwagon about locally grown food right now. We finally figured out that grapes from Chile might not be any better than grapes from the next county. Or that the tomatoes 20 miles away actually could be sent to you ripe.
The local food movement is a small but worthy contribution to using less energy. From both the environmental and security standpoints, it's important for communities to start considering how they could produce more food locally.
Community gardens are ornamental, entertaining, community building, and also practical. We know the source of the food grown there and what chemicals are used. If you suffer from community poverty, this is a great environmental sustainability activity. If your neighborhood is high-income, your community garden could be a terrific social activity that lasts a season--just what it takes to build a friendship.
Environmental Justice
Since we mentioned income, one final page to explore is related to environmental justice. If you haven't heard that term, it's used to describe the fact that disproportionately, poor and minority neighborhoods have to endure most of the undesirable land uses, such as landfills. Their neighborhoods tolerate the worst of the air and water pollution. That isn't at all fair, since the low-income folk use less stuff. Let's be better.
On the bright side, environmental sustainability saves money if practiced regularly and consistently.
Return from Environmental Sustainability
to useful-community-development.org Home
|
