Sustainable Development Practices for Communities

Sustainable development practices highlighted on this page will include green building and how to build green communities. We'll not be discussing the broader economic and social principles underlying the term sustainable development. You can explore those on our definition page.

Green building, as currently understood, entails both sustainable development practices, operation, and even demolition practices (now called de-construction if it involves carefully taking apart the building to salvage and recycle materials).

If you're in an urban neighborhood undergoing reinvestment, the numerous building projects can expose you to all kinds of nasty chemicals. The toxic waste has to leave, but your publicity about sustainable development practices may assure that at least environmentally superior materials are coming into your neighborhood.

So whether for your neighborhood, or your own personal use, here are some green building principles:

1. Where you build makes a tremendous difference. Try to build on an infill site, meaning a site that already was developed at least once in recent human history. If you're a business, this is probably the number one thing you can do to reduce energy use on the part of your employees getting to work and your suppliers and vendors providing goods and services to you in an energy-efficient manner. Yes, build close to your frequent business contacts and, if you must, to the airport, but try not to build on greenfields (land not previously developed).

2. In fact, re-use a building if you possibly can. Some brainstorming and a small amount of an architect's time could unearth options you never thought you'd have.

3. During the development process, return leftover materials and recycle scraps whenever possible. Be mindful of how rain might erode away exposed soils or carry pollutants where you didn't intend them to be.

4. Use local materials where possible. The cost of transporting granite from New Hampshire or marble from Italy to your building site could be considerable.

5. Design and build for low energy usage. Heating and cooling are your major targets, so consider non-traditional systems such as geothermal, as well as passive solar and just plain smart orientation toward wind and sun. Programmable thermostats and appliances will help. Windmills and photovoltaic cells aren't practical for most building situations yet, but you can certainly choose Energy Star appliances.

6. Substitute fast-growing woods for slow-growth woods. In the trade they call this selecting "resource efficient" materials. That's what's behind bamboo flooring.

7. Choose materials, methods, fixtures, and appliances designed for longevity and low maintenance. Rapid replacement and trashing of building elements are wasteful.

8. Select non-toxic materials as much as possible. Chemicals in common cabinets, paints, and carpets give off VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and not only lead to allergic symptoms while in use, but also linger around for a long time in the afterlife.

9. For unique and interesting features in the home, including mantles, doors, windows, bathroom fixtures, and so forth, visit an architectural details salvager.

10. Make your building project use water efficiently. You can capture rainwater in rain barrels and re-use that untreated rainwater for irrigation, if you are so silly as to choose plants that need irrigation. Use low-water showers, dishwashers, toilets, and so forth.

11. For your parking lots, try to use a permeable paver, and build the minimum of parking your municipality will allow, especially if your soils and climate would permit parking on grass or other plant materials for rare overflow occasions.

12. Detain stormwater runoff on your property as long as possible. The theory of how to do this is called low-impact development. Develop a rain garden to receive and cleanse the stormwater your rooftop guttering system collects. Some will evaporate, and in any case the water that eventually finds its way to the municipal system will be much cleaner.

Green Communities: What You Can Do Locally

Many municipalities and counties are getting on board with the whole green movement, for a variety of reasons. Usually one or two leaders feel strong about this issue personally, and sometimes a smart department head figures out why green is actually more economical in the long run for the local government.

Municipalities approach the topic in a variety of ways. The U.S. Conference of Mayors sponsors a climate change initiative, and many communities also have joined the Sierra Club's Cool Cities anti-climate change program. In addition, an organization called ICLEI--Local Governments for Sustainability is an international group of cities concerned with climate action.

This organization has put together a greenhouse gas emissions inventory software program that a municipality can obtain at modest cost. College interns make completing the program in summer a realistic goal. This serves as a baseline measurement for a community.

If you're not as interested in the quanitification that marks the sustainable development practices movement, as opposed to just going green, my thought is to concentrate on a few basics in your neighborhood first. Here's my list:

• Provide neighborhood recycling containers if you don't have mandatory curbside recycling. Contact the dealers, who will provide the containers. It takes some labor to keep a recycling center tidy though, so it's not as easy as it seems. In addition to the actual products physically recycled, it's great to build awareness that yes, this is something that can be recycled, and also the awareness of OMG, we used that much paper.

• Emphasize a walkable grid, which also will be a bikeable grid. Then plan a mix of land uses that allow people to purchase some frequent needs very close to home, and allow others to work from home or very close to home.

• Be bold and call for narrowing of some streets as a traffic calming measure. Rip out that concrete or asphalt, recycle it, and make rain gardens instead. Rain gardens slow stormwater runoff, which carries pollutants into our water.

• Investigate whether electricity generation, wastewater treatment, and drinking water treatment can become less energy-intensive. These processes require huge quantities of our energy. Sustainable development practices certainly should be followed when replacing any utility capacity.

• Reinvigorate your land use and zoning processes to assure that they promote mixed use development, transit-oriented development if you are fortunate enough to have a transit system, and generally reduce the length of the commute to work. Providing affordable housing or workforce housing and transit to major employment centers are critical sustainable development practices.

• Remember to reserve open space whenever possible. Open spaces filter water runoff, support biodiversity that it useful to both the health and pleasure of humankind, relieve air pollution, and allow people to be exposed to nature without taking long trips.

• In urban areas, certainly encourage parks and the maintenance of them, and introduce the idea with some education, the populace will tolerate the idea of replacing turf grass with native plantings that require less fertilizer, maintenance, and energy-intensive mowing. Maintain your trees, and where they are lacking around parking lots, along streets, and within public and private spaces, introduce them.

It's a short list, but if you engage in all of these sustainable development practices wholeheartedly, think of the impact on your community.

What Businesses Can Do

Some business leaders have been concerned about both a corporation's economic and environmental impacts. Mostly I hear this happening in terms of emphasis on recycling, improving energy efficiency of the building and vehicles, encouraging car pooling, and "green" building when new construction occurs. Some are trying to buy their utility’s "green energy" credits to offset their carbon footprint.

The utility companies may or may not be on board with any definition of sustainable development you can forge. Fear of change would be their biggest reason to oppose your becoming a green community and embracing a modest definition of sustainable development as your city's standard. In the business sense, the changes would provide exciting new challenges for employees who have become bureaucrats. The retraining effort, while vast, also could be reinvigorating for the blue collar crowd. So it's mostly fear of the unknown that would keep a utility out of the game.

If your area is not a growth area, the utility also may have some justified fear of massive new investments, which will require a long time to amortize. To counter this argument, you must step up your economic development game in a major way. For businesses, you should try first to motivate your largest employers, hospitals, universities, school systems, and utilities toward sustainable development practices.

Have your chamber of commerce or small business organization set up an interest group for greening in general and sustainable development practices for the smaller businesses.

But if you're trying to make a city-wide impact, work hard at picking up large business converts first. Their sheer scale will make a world of difference, and in some ways, their large management staffs make it easier to find one individual who will be your champion.

Of course many businesses are stuck in the era before the first Earth Day. Just the other day I watched a light industry throwing various waste products directly into a creek just because it's easier. I didn't think it was anything particularly vile, but then I don't really know what kind of paint is on those boards either. So whether business wants to embrace sustainable development practices varies widely.

But I can tell you that understanding sustainable development practices can provide entrepreneurs with a new business idea. There’s even a term for it. Are you ready? It’s sustainopreneurship. The connotation is that this entrepreneur not only makes or sells something related to sustainable development practices, but also that the business somehow drives innovation.

So become a researcher-inventor-sustainability proponent-entrepreneur if you're interested in sustainable development practices.

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