Sustainability In Your Community
 Is your community working toward sustainability? If the sustainable communities movement hasn't already reached your area, there's lots of information available to help you get started—an internet search of "sustainable communities" resulted in over 1,500,000 hits! Search out ideas from other places, and start a sustainability movement in your own community.
If taking on the development of a sustainable community all at once seems overwhelming, start slowly by urging your community to adopt some of the tips found under the topics below.
The categories below aren't mutually exclusive, so read them all to find many good tips.
Steps to start toward community sustainability
 General
Encourage everyone in your community to follow the tips posted at Sustainability at Home. Encourage local businesses and your local government to follow the tips posted at Sustainability at Work.
Heating and cooling
Install programmable thermostats in public buildings. Heating and cooling losses from a public building become greater as the difference in temperature increases. A programmable thermostat reduces these losses by allowing the temperature difference to be reduced at times when the lower amount of heating or cooling would not be objectionable.
By using a programmable thermostat, heating or air-conditioning levels automatically change according to a pre-set schedule allowing the equipment to operate at a lower level when all or part of the building is unoccupied. Programmable thermostats can store and repeat multiple daily settings that can be manually modified without affecting the rest of the daily or weekly program.
Lighting
One porch light bulb at a time
Groundwork Denver and the Porch Bulb Project are joining forces to reduce greenhouse gas emissions one porch bulb at a time. Using teams of volunteers, they are replacing incandescent porch bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. The switch results in an immediate reduction of energy use by 75%.
LED Lighting
Regardless of fixture type, all commercial LED lights use less electricity than comparatively priced fluorescent fixtures. Because they are the most energy efficient lights available, commercial LED lights are an excellent way to immediately begin reducing costs.
As LED light technology continues to evolve, commercial LED lights are being used in every major outdoor lighting application. Commercial LED streetlights could potentially reduce some municipal lighting costs as much as 50% in some cities and towns, and the longer lifespan of these fixtures offers additional savings by minimizing maintenance and replacement costs. Many cities across the US are experimenting with LED streetlights and are quickly discovering that these fixtures provide a much more controllable and efficient form of lighting than incandescent sources. New developments in diode technology allow light and color levels to be customized to the environment. LED street lights allow for more precise control of the light beam itself, directing it with greater precision than metal halide and high-pressure sodium equivalents. This control makes it possible to light streets and sidewalks without excess light spilling into yards and shining into windows. Added benefits include not only lower lighting costs, but also less light pollution.
Night Light Pollution
Consider adopting an Outdoor Lighting Ordinance to provide an environment free of night light pollution. The Ordinance is intended to remove any direct glare source that can be potentially hazardous when viewed from roadways or can be offensive to occupants of other residential or business properties.
Water
Single Serving Water Bottle Reduction Program
More than 40 million gallons of oil are needed to make the plastic water bottles Americans purchase each year. Like other uses of fossil fuels, the process of making plastic bottles releases carbon dioxide. San Francisco banned the use of city funds to purchase bottled water, even for water coolers. If your local tap water quality is acceptable, citizens could be encouraged or required to use reusable water containers.
WaterSense
WaterSense, a partnership program sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, makes it easy for Americans to save water and protect the environment. Look for the WaterSense label to choose quality, water-efficient products.
Communities can use WaterSense ideas to develop and implement sustainable water management programs to meet the present and future water needs of residents and businesses. By promoting water-efficient practices and services through incentive programs and educating residents and businesses about water efficiency, you can help protect water resources for future generations. Develop a water conservation plan. Read the Using Water Efficiently: Ideas for Communities fact sheet for ideas on how to help your community reduce its water use. For more information visit EPA's Related Links page for additional water-efficiency resources.
Buildings
Municipal buildings can be sustainable. Read Path to Sustainable Municipal Buildings (pdf) for suggestions. For more detailed information check out the Sustainable Building Sourcebook. The Sourcebook presents recommendations to make homes and some types of commercial and municipal development more environmentally friendly. The Sourcebook provides the practical information needed to better understand and implement these options. The Sourcebook is divided into the following general sections: Water, Energy, Building Materials, and Solid Waste. Each section is formatted into: Overview, Guidelines, and Resources.
Outdoors—landscaping, parking
Landscaping
The Compost Action Project provides information on mid- to large-scale composting (i.e., beyond the backyard bin). Implementing such a project helps communities to extend the life of their landfills and create rich soil amendments that can be used in civic parks, flower gardens, sports fields, and golf courses and sold to their residents.
Landscaping with native wildflowers and grasses improves the environment and brings a taste of wilderness to urban, suburban, and corporate settings by attracting a variety of birds, butterflies, and other animals. Once established, native plants do not need as much fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, or watering, thus benefiting the environment and reducing maintenance costs. EPA is a source of much information about using native plants in landscaping. The Tennessee Native Plant Society provides information about growing native plants from seeds and cuttings for use in naturalized landscapes.
Parking
As more people own cars, more parking lots become necessary. The Public Works Department in Olympia, Washington, found that parking lots account for 53% of imperviousness on a commercial site and 15% on multi-family sites, figures typical of most communities. Unfortunately, parking lots can adversely affect the environment as well as detract from community character. Paved parking lots are typically designed to collect and concentrate large areas of stormwater runoff, which can impact a receiving stream's hydrography as well as water quality. Paved parking lots also generate heat, raising the air temperature in surrounding areas and the temperature of the first flush of stormwater, creating significant ecological impacts. Careful attention to parking lot design will go a long way toward protecting your community's water resources. Check out Tips for Reducing Runoff from Parking Lots for many suggestions.
Parking Management
Parking management includes a variety of strategies that encourage more efficient use of
existing parking facilities, upgrade the quality of service provided to parking facility users, and improve parking facility design. Current parking planning practices (such as generous minimum parking requirements and public provision of on- and off-street parking) tend to result in abundant and generally free parking at most destinations. This subsidizes automobile travel and encourages lower-density land use patterns. More efficient parking management can address these problems, helping to achieve a variety of transportation, land use, development, economic, and environmental objectives. Examples of parking management programs include:
- Installing parking meters and increasing parking fees in community-owned lots or garages. Increased parking fees promote use of other transportation modes and can help to pay for programs to further promote use of alterative transport modes.
- Providing free or reduced price parking spaces for low emissions vehicles to encourage people to use or purchase them.
- Adopting a parking "cash out" program that allows employees to be compensated for not having a parking space. That is, the employer who leases (or owns) a space pays the employee not to park. In 1992 California enacted legislation (AB 2109, KATZ) that requires many employers to offer employees the option to choose cash in lieu of any parking subsidy offered. A study showed that this legislation reduced total vehicle miles traveled for commuting by 12 percent, but it appears dependent on having fee-based parking to begin with.
Wastes—reduce, reuse, recycle, carefully dispose
By working together schools, businesses, local governments, and other parts of a community can reduce and better manage their waste. EPA provides on line resources in the following categories that are designed to help citizens and local community leaders better manage materials and waste:
- Community programs and community service/volunteering
- Composting
- Food recovery
- Recycling
- Waste prevention
- Landfills
- Public participation/citizen action
- Municipal solid waste
- Hazardous wastes
- Universal waste
- Waste-derived fertilizers
- Other resources
Zero Waste Events
Make all community-sponsored events "zero waste" by, for example, using 100% compostable plates, utensils, and cups and recyclable beverage containers. Ensure that the material is properly collected and delivered to a composting or recycling company for proper processing.
Require that all events held by others on community land also be zero waste. Educate the public on how to do this for their events. Provide education and training to encourage companies to do the same.
Transportation, vehicles, and equipment (including lawnmowers)
Encourage telecommuting, carpooling, and public transit in your community to cut mileage and car maintenance costs and reduce air pollution. Reducing the number of vehicles on the road also eliminates the need to widen highways, saves energy, and makes better use of available land.
A Guide to Transportation Opportunities in Your Community from the Surface Transportation Policy Project reviews how federal surface transportation law can be used to support local and statewide efforts to build more livable communities and expand travel options.
Reduce vehicle commuting by high schools students
Involve the student body in developing incentives to encourage high school student to commute by walking, skate boarding, biking, car pooling, or using mass transit or other alternative means of transport. Make riding the school bus cool!
Climate—greenhouse gases
Office Carbon Footprint Tool
Encourage office-based organizations, businesses, and governments to use EPA's Office Carbon Footprint Tool, available on line as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Office-based organizations can use this tool to assist them in making decisions on how to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their activities. This tool allows users to develop an estimate of their GHG emissions from a variety of sources, such as organization-owned vehicle transportation; purchased electricity; waste disposal; and leased assets, franchises, and outsourced activities. It is not intended to address manufacturing operations or service-oriented businesses that use significant quantities of chemicals (e.g., cleaning services). This tool provides examples of carbon-cutting actions including recycling, waste prevention, and green power purchasing.
Increase Urban Forestry
Portland, Oregon, has successfully planted and maintained hundreds of thousands of trees since Friends of Trees, a group dedicated to building community through tree planting, was founded in 1989. These trees sequester carbon, reducing greenhouse gas levels.
Establish a GHG Reduction Goal for Municipal Emissions
Help you community to set a GHG reduction goal for municipal operations and develop a plan to meet it. Specific suggestions to reduce municipal GHG emissions include:
- Improving municipal building energy efficiency.
- Having a competition between municipal departments or buildings on energy efficiency.
- Requirement municipal buildings to be carbon neutral.
- Developing a policy to use high performing "green" concrete (i.e., concrete that replaces some of the cement in it with other substances such as fly ash, a reusable byproduct from power plants that is often thrown away, or titanium dioxide.) Production of cement, concrete's key component, accounts for at least five percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
- Purchasing high efficiency, light duty vehicles for municipal use.
Carbon Concierge
Carbon Concierge, Your Personal Carbon Keeper provides information about carbon emissions, how to calculate a carbon footprint, and how to offset carbon emissions. The program could be operated by a full or part-time city employee or employees, relying heavily on on-line resources. Feedback devices such as the "Kil-a-Watt" meter could be incorporated into this program to assist people in reducing energy use. This program could promote efforts to reduce carbon emissions at the neighborhood level, including car pooling and community gardening.
Community-wide Climate Challenge
Develop a climate challenge for citizens and businesses to promote best-practices relating to energy conservation, purchase of recyclable and recycled products, support for multimodal transportation, and waste reduction. Places where this has been proposed or implemented include:
- Groundwork Denver, in cooperation with the City of Denver, is planning to roll out a Denver Climate Challenge pilot program to reduce greenhouse gases in 2008. The program will be delivered at the community level, utilizing local media, working through social networks, showcasing actions by neighborhood leaders, enlisting the participation of local businesses, and providing door-to-door outreach in low-income neighborhoods. Residents will be educated about the connections between energy and water use, food packaging, and transportation and their carbon footprint, economic prosperity, and public health. They will be encouraged to save energy and water in the home, use renewable energy, use alternative transportation modes, recycle, and plant trees to reduce their carbon footprint, save money, improve their health, and demonstrate civic responsibility.
- Burlington, VT, has implemented the "10% Challenge," a voluntary program to raise public awareness about global climate change and to encourage households and businesses to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10 percent.
Purchasing Choices
Buy Local
Purchase locally produced goods, and set up a program to publicize the benefits of doing so to promote their purchase by others. In addition to promoting a healthy local economy, the purchase of locally produced goods results in lower carbon emissions due to decreased transportation requirements.
ENERGY STAR
When shopping, be sure to look for products with the ENERGY STAR logo.
Wellness
Walking and Cycling Improvements
Walking and cycling programs can improve sidewalks, crosswalks, and paths; calm traffic; and employ street-scaping to create more pedestrian-friendly streets and encourage nonmotorized travel. According to some estimates, 5 to 10 percent of automobile trips can reasonably be shifted to non-motorized transport in a typical urban area, and nonmotorized improvements can have leveraging effects that increase their importance. Examples of programs to increase cycling include:
- Complete a bike system to make it a viable commuter system.
- Improve existing commuter bike lanes and paths.
- Provide additional bicycle lanes on heavily traveled streets.
- Provide additional bicycle parking, including covered parking.
- Implement a rebate program to promote bicycle ownership. Consider tiered rebates (with local purchases offering higher rebates) for the purchase of bicycles from shops located within city limits. Publicizing this program well is important.
Smart growth in Tennessee
Smart Growth is a community-based approach that focuses on how a community grows, considering economics, geography, society, and the environment. Sustainable Tennessee, a 2008 Initiative of UT Knoxville's Extension, Family & Consumer Sciences, focused on a strategy through which communities approach growth in ways that foster economic development while also benefiting the local environment and enhancing the quality of life in the local community. In general, smart growth invests time, attention, and resources in restoring community and vitality to center cities and older suburbs. Smart growth is more town-centered, is transit and pedestrian oriented, and includes a greater mix of housing, commercial, and retail uses. It also preserves open space and many other environmental amenities.
Smart Growth for Tennessee Towns and Counties: A Process Guide summarizes the basic steps in a smart growth visioning and planning process. It includes two case studies and an extensive list of resources.
Smart Growth in Tennessee (pdf) discusses the issue of sprawl in Tennessee and how it is transforming the landscape. Farms are becoming housing sub-divisions or shopping centers, small towns are becoming suburbs, suburbs are becoming satellite cities, two-lane roads are becoming four-lane highways. Sprawl is proliferating in Tennessee.
Read about how Chattanooga is using city-wide planning to restore air quality and become a model of sustainability.
Your actions
What choices and obstacles is your community facing in an effort to become more sustainable? What have you done to move your community toward sustainability? What have you learned from those experiences that can help others? What choices and obstacles have you faced? Do you have ideas, comments, or questions? Join the information exchange and share your successes, frustrations, and failures with others. (You must be signed in to the site as a ORNL user to post items. Click on "Sign In" at the top right of the page. Use "ornl\UID" [note that you must use a backslash] and your UCAMS password.) Search out ideas from other places, and start a sustainability movement in your own community. Below are a few places where you can find information to help you begin:
The Sustainable Communities Network is a resource for those who want to help make their communities more livable. Here a broad range of issues are addressed, and resources are provided to help make this happen. This web site was developed to increase the visibility of what has worked for other communities. It also aims to promote a lively exchange of information to help create community sustainability in both urban and rural areas.
Placemaking, tools for community action (pdf) is a starter kit from the Sustainable Communities Network. It can be used by a community member, city official, planner, or design professional to identify currently available planning tools and to assess their applicability and appropriateness to specific projects or issues, alone or in combination.
Smart Strategies for a Sustainable Future, EPA's Green Communities website, provides tools and information on the best strategies, programs, and policies to reduce your community's environmental footprint and make it more sustainable. A 5-step environmental planning framework leads your community to a greener, sustainable future:
Each step includes an introduction, how to get started on that step, tools, case studies, publications, and frequent questions. EPA discontinued the Green Communities Designation program in 2006, but the web site still provides much useful information.
More Information
Start by searching the web for organizations that are active in your area or check out the web sites provided by the organizations described below for additional tips and advice to make your community more sustainable:
FedCenter.gov is the federal government's home for comprehensive environmental stewardship and compliance assistance information. Its My Community/My Facility page provides access to numerous data systems that contain information about issues such as your compliance record, the permits you have, the wastes generated by your facility and your neighbors, the status of your watersheds, air monitoring data, and population statistics.
The Sustainable Communities Network web site provides links to information to help make your community more livable.
Since 1978, the Center for Neighborhood Technology has been a leader in promoting urban sustainability—the more effective use of existing resources and community assets to improve the health of natural systems and the wealth of people, today and in the future.
In 1996 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency joined with several non-profit and government organizations to form the Smart Growth Network. The Network was started in response to increasing community concerns about the need for new ways to grow that boost the economy, protect the environment, and enhance community vitality. The Network's partners include environmental, historic preservation, and professional organizations; developers and real estate interests; and local and state government entities.
The Smart Growth Leadership Institute in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provides implementation tools for smart growth. Start developing your smart growth plan by following any of the links below:
Smart Growth America is a coalition of national, state, and local organizations working to improve the ways towns, cities, and metro areas are planned and built. The coalition includes many of the best-known national organizations advocating on behalf of historic preservation, the environment, farmland and open space preservation, neighborhood revitalization, and more. Its state- and regional-level members are community-based organizations working to save treasured landscapes while making their towns and cities ever more livable and lovable. |