This article was written by Deneine Christa Powell, Executive Director of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, the largest city-based sustainability network in the United States of America. Referencing examples from three US cities, she explains how ideas once considered to be the reserve of the sustainability movement are being rethought as essential urban survival strategies and argues that there’s urgent need for more of the same.
Many Americans likely don’t know the full extent of their city or county’s office of sustainability, climate, or environment every day work. If you survey someone on the street, they may mention the words recycling, trash cleanup, composting, or tree-planting – the activities of a typical Earth Day event. Or, if they’re really tracking the city or county’s work, they might mention weatherisation, residential solar, heat pumps, and e-bikes.
The reality is that there’s so much more these offices are doing and it’s often in areas that most residents wouldn’t expect. Three examples illustrate just how expansive a sustainability office’s work is, from cleaning our air, water, and streets, to ensuring a clean energy cover to our dirtiest of dumps. A more apt name might be the office of all things clean, because that’s in essence what this work is about.
Examples of Successful Sustainable Initiatives
Take San Francisco, Seattle, and Milwaukee’s stories below. In all three of these cases, one might have assumed that the Department of Health or the Department of Public Works was handling it because in all three of these cases, there were clear improvements to both human and physical infrastructure.
Case Study 1: Health
San Francisco’s Safe Medicine Disposal Program is keeping streets and waterways clean by making it easy to safely dispose of unwanted medications. Over the past decade, the program has collected more than 250,000 pounds (about 113,400 KG) of unused medicine through permanent drop-off sites, free mail-back services, and community collection events, removing potential hazards before they can do harm.
That impact matters. Discarded hypodermic needles pose an obvious and immediate risk to public safety. Less visible, but just as concerning, are the long-term effects of pharmaceuticals like antibiotics, hormones, and antidepressants entering our waterways. These substances have been linked to endocrine disruption, antibiotic resistance, and developmental harm.
Safe disposal is a simple solution with far-reaching benefits. By making it convenient for residents to do the right thing, San Francisco is protecting its water, reducing preventable poisonings, and keeping dangerous waste off the streets. It’s a practical, effective approach to public health and a model that other cities should follow.
Case Study 2: Air Quality
Seattle’s sustainability office is teaming up with Dirt Corps and other community partners to clean up city air by building green walls in communities hit hardest by pollution. Most city industrial areas will have poor air quality due to industry emissions, high temperatures due to impervious surfaces, and very few trees. Seattle’s industrial zones are no different. In South Park and Georgetown, communities are surrounded by industry and, as a result, their residents have long suffered from pollution, which has led to lower life expectancy and negative health outcomes. And this has been going on for generations.
Cue the green walls. Imagine a blank, barren wall on the side of an industrial building. Now swap out that blank wall with plants that canvass the entire side of the building. That green canvass of plants can provide a wide range of benefits to local residents. Not only does it clean the local air, but it also cools and beautifies it. Imagine what a difference it would make to scale it across an entire city.
Here’s how it works: these vertical gardens clean air pollution by trapping particulate matter like soot on their leaves, absorbing harmful gases with their foliage, and using microorganisms in their roots to degrade pollutants. They can reduce temperatures by nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5°C) in some climates and can save on energy costs by up to 40 percent. As cities become hotter, and the heat island effect becomes more damaging to residents’ health, these degrees matter. Green walls, then, can be a life-saving measure, in addition to a breathability aide.
Case Study 3: Clean Energy
Milwaukee’s Environmental Collaboration Office is making efficient use of city property by ensuring their landfills are covered with clean energy. When you’ve got eight acres of city-owned, closed-landfill land sitting by the airport, and you can put 7,000 solar panels to power the equivalent of 450 Milwaukee homes at no cost to the taxpayer, that’s an efficient use of city property.
To be clear, Americans in a bipartisan way are overwhelmingly supportive of solar power, with 90 percent of Americans in favour of more solar farms. Even better: when it’s on rooftops and parking lots, which can be a win-win for parking lot owners, by providing additional revenue streams, and drivers, by providing protection from weather damage to their cars.
Landfills, like the one in Milwaukee, fit that bipartisan bill, too, especially ones by the airport. It’s an efficient use of city property that provides new revenue streams while powering homes off clean energy.
That’s Just the Start!
This is all no-brainer bipartisan stuff. Making sure our air is breathable, our streets and waterways are safe, and our city properties are used as efficiently and cleanly as possible. As taxpayers, that’s exactly what we would expect them to do and hope they would. And spoiler, they’re already doing it. Now, here’s to scaling it and more!
Deneine Christa Powell is the Chief Executive Officer of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, a network of 330 cities and counties across North America which is innovating new approaches in response to federal crackdowns on climate/sustainability.