The Green Committee and You
The Green Committee met for the first time on Thursday the 10th as reported by Steve Smith of the Reminder News.
Our first meeting was for the most part a meet and greet session where the Mayor explained our purpose, which is to create plans for conservation and/or cost savings in town operations as well as create suggestions that each of us can choose to utilize at home to reduce our own energy costs and consumption.
We discussed quite a few options for reducing town costs and consumption and intend to identify many more. Some of what has been brainstormed so far:
- Enhanced recycling in schools
- Limit the heat in town buildings to 65° during the winter
- Solar generation on the landfill and other town buildings/property
- Gas reclamation from the landfill
- Eliminating the idling of police vehicles
- Reducing town operations where possible to a 4 day work week
- Single stream recycling
- Recycling education (Did you know the town makes $7/ton a recycling and pays $70/ton on trash?)
- Limiting town vehicles to the speed limits at all times
- Thinking long term for capital improvements (ie permanent roofs on buildings once at a higher initial cost instead of 3+ roofs at sequentially inflated prices)
- Utilizing other trash to energy methods
Please share any suggestions you have or ideas you want the Green Committee to consider. With any luck and a bit of dedication I hope that the committee will be able to identify some considerable cost savings for the taxpayers of East Hartford.
All good ideas.
I’d expand them though to begin those discussions with the current process owners. For example, building infrastructure discussion should begin with the facilities’ managers… waste disposal likely begins with CRRA. And community outreach would begin… probably with the media, such as the Courant. And regulators will also be involved to some extent. For instance, if you want to mess with the dump… the DEP will almost certainly be interested. In this case, the DEP may be more concerned in avoiding any impervious surfaces (such as photovoltaics) that could disrupt rainwater… than in avoiding the use of fossil fuels in generating electricity.
Just some ideas.
And for another idea… here’s a forum I organized this past week…
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6089976384846224973&q=alternative+energy+onsite+stationary+power&ei=lNeTSM6LEoSkrQKMk5WwCQ&hl=en