Six Places Doing It Right

Sustainability is a tantalizing idea and a trendy buzzword. Who wouldn’t want to find a way to build, produce and consume more without causing damage to our land and its inhabitants?
But in practice, new ideas require so many trade-offs—and so much cooperation among public, private and nongovernmental players—that they often get stuck, especially at the federal level. Across a country with varied geography and regional economies, there are just too many competing industries, sectors and interests to find a way forward. So if you’re looking for innovation on sustainability, train your eye on states and cities.
More and more communities are finding ways to break through the political logjam and bring together private firms, public utilities, advocacy groups, governments and others. What do these projects look like? We asked POLITICO’s nationwide network of state-level reporters to track down cutting-edge approaches to solving public problems with an eye to the long-term future.
As private lenders pull back during the economic downturn, some states are turning to a novel source of capital: taxpayer-backed “green” banks, which keep money flowing to finance projects that promote sustainability goals.
New Jersey plans to set up a green financing arm by the end of this year to fund environmentally friendly infrastructure. The move follows in the footsteps of Connecticut, New York and other states that provide loans and grants to fund carbon-cutting projects, such as community solar and energy efficiency retrofits. Green banks in New York and Connecticut, for example, have continued financing during the pandemic even as many homeowners and small businesses put projects on hold.
The New Jersey Economic Development Authority will seed its green bank—essentially a pot of capital, not an actual bank—with some $12 million in annual revenue it collects from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate carbon cap-and-trade program. The bank will prioritize projects that offer employment training and create jobs.
“Access to affordable financing and job training will be instrumental in helping New Jersey build back better,” said Pari Kasotia, mid-Atlantic director for the nonprofit advocacy group Vote Solar. “By being able to invest in clean energy now, New Jersey’s low-income and environmental justice communities will also be more economically resilient to the next crisis, thanks to lower energy bills.”
While the banks aren’t new—Connecticut launched the nation’s first in 2011—their numbers are growing. In 2019, the nine global members of the Green Bank Network committed a total of nearly $15 billion, mobilizing $50 billion in public and private capital. Now the coronavirus pandemic is giving them a chance to flex their muscle as other lenders rein in business.
Money is invested in projects that deliver environmental, health, social—and financial—returns. And the institutions are designed to demonstrate to Wall Street and local banks that an investment in clean energy can be a safe bet — an outcome that Connecticut and New York have already proved can work.
New Jersey’s initial $12 million investment might not sound like much—New York established its bank with $1 billion in 2013—but it will be “a ton of money” if it can draw private capital off the sidelines to launch new projects, said Jeffrey Schub, executive director of the Coalition for Green Capital, a nonprofit that advocates the creation of green banks.
“It’s obviously not enough to decarbonize the entire economy or reemploy the millions of New Jerseyans who are out of work, but it’s the start you need to build off of because the hardest thing to find is the first investment of risk capital," Schub said. “It can be a way of priming the pump.”
The takeaway: Putting up a little bit of public money has been shown to draw in significant private investment in green initiatives—even as traditional forms of financing shrink.
—Samantha Maldonado
As power companies shift to large-scale renewable energy, cash-strapped school systems in Virginia have become a surprise beneficiary. By the end of this year, the commonwealth will have 50 electric school buses on the road, thanks to a partnership with Dominion Energy, which is picking up the bulk of the cost of the fleets.
Big yellow buses are noisy, expensive and heavy on particulate emissions. But they’re also cheap—about a third the cost of electric-powered buses—so schools have little incentive to upgrade.
Dominion Energy, conversely, has plenty of incentive. As the company works to reduce its carbon footprint, it’s shifting to renewable energy, a fickle resource that produces power only when the sun shines or the wind blows. When solar and wind do send power to the grid, it needs to be stored until it’s needed—and Dominion thinks school bus batteries are just the place.
“You have a form of transportation that relies on batteries, runs on very predictable schedules, and parks in the same place every day,” said Mark Webb, senior vice president and chief innovation officer at Dominion. “They only run half the year, about 180 days. The other 180 days they’re sitting there unused, and there’s a great big battery available to us.”
When the bus needs to drive kids to school, the battery powers the bus, just like an electric car. When the bus is parked, its battery becomes storage for the electric grid itself. So when Virginia cranks up the air conditioning on sweltering August afternoons, for instance, its parked school buses can be tapped to meet demand for peak power. If things go as planned, Dominion will have 1,000 battery-powered school buses by 2025, providing 200 megawatts of storage capacity, enough to power more than 10,000 homes.
Bus-sized batteries aren’t cheap, and to hit that mark, Dominion needs to prove to regulators that the program is worth the cost. The company and its school partners think they have a strong case. Beyond the grid, the potential benefits to public health, and the fiscal boost to schools, could be enormous.
School districts will get a new battery-powered bus for about $100,000, the cost of a typical diesel vehicle. Dominion will take title to the battery system, electric motor and charging infrastructure, at a cost to the company of about $300,000 per bus.
This fall, Fairfax County Public Schools will get eight electric buses, which Asistant Superintendent Jeffrey Platenberg expects will cost about half as much to operate and maintain as diesel vehicles in the county’s 1,300-bus fleet.
“There’s so many upsides,” Platenberg said, when asked about the potential risks. “The downside is we didn’t get enough of them.”
The takeaway: A novel, niche partnership between an energy producer and local school districts could reduce greenhouse gases, save costs and help solve a key problem with renewable energy.
—Lorraine Woellert
West Coast cities—think San Francisco and Seattle—have required residents to separate their food waste for years—an effort that has diverted huge waste streams out of landfills and trained residents to recycle and compost at a rate three times higher than New York. Now the Big Apple is trying to implement a massive composting program in an effort to show that diverting and reprocessing food waste can work in the largest, most diverse city in America.
Food and yard waste typically get thrown into faraway landfills with the rest of the trash, where it rots and emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But if New York succeeds in diverting roughly 1 million tons of organic waste annually away from landfills, it could cut those emissions and save the city money by reducing what it spends to ship the waste out of the city. It could even generate revenue by producing biogas or compost, which the city could sell.
City leaders are in talks to get a bill passed this year to begin phasing in a mandatory organic waste recycling program for residents in 2022 or 2023. The program would build on an existing composting system for restaurants and hotels, and a network of 175 drop-off sites run by nonprofits that repurpose residents’ yard scraps, orange rinds and vegetable peels at small compost sites throughout the five boroughs.
Mayor Bill de Blasio might be getting cold feet: Although he pledged as a candidate to institute a mandatory organics program, he cut a voluntary curbside program to collect organic waste as he tries to close a $9.7 billion deficit over the next two years. But the idea is popular with other candidates for mayor, including City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, a top-tier mayoral candidate, who has made food waste recycling a focal point of his legislative agenda for the year. Other city lawmakers have introduced a bill to add more food scrap drop-off sites in the interim.
While the organics program has suffered a setback from the coronavirus pandemic, sanitation officials have said they intend to restore it when the city rebounds fiscally. Meanwhile, the concept of making composting a part of New Yorkers’ everyday recycling habits has gained traction among residents and top lawmakers want to implement the program to help eliminate the piles of black trash bags lined up on city sidewalks every night.
The takeaway: If composting can be successfully integrated into the waste management systems of a city like New York, it will demonstrate that the concept is economically and politically viable beyond the smaller, more environmentally minded West Coast cities where it got started. In short, to paraphrase a famous New York ballad, if it can work there, it can work anywhere.
—Danielle Muoio

In its campaign to reduce greenhouse gases, California is taking a novel approach to keeping people off the road. Instead of targeting its car-dependent population, the state will require developers to compensate for increased driving caused by new construction.
Starting this month, builders of houses, offices, shopping centers and even roads will have to calculate the expected increase in vehicle miles traveled that will be generated by the new buildings and infrastructure. In order to get a permit for the project under the California Environmental Quality Act, developers will need to show an insignificant impact on emissions or offset the increase by boosting low-emission transportation elsewhere.
The move is a total reversal of how the traffic impact of new construction has been measured in the past. Before, developers had to account for their effects on congestion, which incentivized more road building to accommodate the expected increase in traffic, or more building in less-congested exurbs.
Developers now, instead of making neighborhoods better for vehicles, will have incentive to build in places where driving isn’t necessary. Instead of adding a new traffic light or widening a road to deal with density, projects will add bike lanes, buy transit passes for tenants, or even forgo parking spaces.
The change is "simple but revolutionary," said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who wrote the enabling law when he was president of the state Senate in 2013.
Some cities that already have adopted the approach, such as San Jose, have found large developers eager to comply and burnish their green credentials. Google is planning to widen sidewalks, remove driving lanes and reduce vehicle access to its mixed-use development planned for downtown San Jose. Adobe is remodeling its headquarters with 15 percent less parking to mitigate its 5,720 estimated daily trips.
Environmentalists hope the law will result in less housing in far-flung areas, like a proposed 8,725-unit Villages of Lakewood development in rural Riverside County that they're suing to block.
But housing advocates fret that the policy misses the mark in a state that's struggling to build its way out of a housing deficit. Penalizing developments in road-dependent areas could drive up the cost of housing for those who can't afford to live closer to their jobs.
"Not only is this a scheme to build hyperexpensive housing near job centers, it's also a scheme to charge those who have to move away for housing they can afford," said Jennifer Hernandez, a land-use lawyer representing a group called the Two Hundred that claims the rules discriminate against low-income and minority residents who have been the victims of past redlining housing policies.
The takeaway: While concerns remain around affordable housing and inland areas of the state, California has achieved a public-private consensus on the need to reduce driving. As CalTrans Director Toks Omishakin put it: "The days of building more giant freeways onto the system, those days are gone."
—Debra Kahn
Artificial intelligence has already revolutionized cars, electronics and manufacturing. Now it’s helping humans sort their trash.
The problem of sorting different recyclable materials—metals, glass, paper, and plastic—has become a major problem in the industry. Nationally, only about 35 percent of waste deposited in recycling bins is ever processed and reused—the rest winds up in landfills or incinerators, largely because it’s too difficult and expensive to sort the materials correctly. Human sorters don’t stay on the job long because of the poor working conditions. And China in 2017 banned the import of certain types of waste and imposed a 99.5 percent purity standard on the rest.
Now a company called Single Stream Recyclers is using robots to do the job in Sarasota, Florida.
Using technology developed by AMP Robotics, the robots can identify 50 different types of recyclable waste, including variations of plastic, paper, aluminum, wood and electronics. If the robots can do the job, it promises to help reboot the recycling industry.
In Sarasota, 14 robots in a 100,000-square-foot facility work faster and more accurately than human sorters, AMP Robotics CEO Matanya Horowitz said. AMP Robotics technology can deliver a recovery rates of between 90 percent and 95 percent at a purity rate of 98 percent, Horowitz said. AMP’s system harvests data from installations around the world and is continuously being updated, with new materials being identified each week through computer vision and deep learning. If a new material is identified in a facility in Colorado, the machines in Florida will be able to identify it, too.
The takeaway: Robots hold promise for rescuing the recycling industry, which is plagued by high turnover rates, inefficient labor outcomes and soaring costs.
—Nancy Vu
Look at maps of oil and gas drilling in southwestern Pennsylvania, and Pittsburgh looks like a doughnut hole surrounded by drilling wells. That doughnut hole is a testament to the success of the rights-of-nature movement, which seeks to protect clean air and water by allowing people to sue on behalf of rivers, lakes and other features of nature.
Pittsburgh in 2010 was the first major U.S. city to grant legal rights to nature, part of a defensive move as oil and gas drillers started eyeing parks and neighborhoods. Since then, more than three dozen U.S. cities have adopted rights-of-nature ordinances, and state constitutional amendments have been proposed in Colorado, Ohio, Oregon and New Hampshire.
In addition to banning drilling, the Pittsburgh ordinance declares that ecosystems possess "inalienable and fundamental" rights to exist and flourish within the city—and that residents have legal standing to enforce those rights. Elsewhere, rights also have been granted or proposed for the Snake River in Idaho, the Ohio River and even the Pacific Ocean. It might sound strange to anyone who assumes that only people can have rights, but to advocates, it’s a long overdue way to ensure that parks and natural spaces—and the people who benefit from them—get their due weight in decisions about land use.
As the ordinances proliferate, they’ve drawn fire from business groups, which have thwarted several recent efforts to adopt them. After Toledo voters passed a ballot measure in 2019 granting rights to Lake Erie, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, signed a law that effectively banned local rights-of-nature ordinances. A federal court in February ruled that the Toledo law was an invalid exercise of municipal power.
In Florida, the Republican-controlled Legislature this year similarly passed a bill that preempted local governments from recognizing rights of nature. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the bill despite veto requests, prompting a federal lawsuit by an environmental group.
Not all businesses oppose giving nature legal standing; among the funders for law centers and environmental groups promoting this approach are Lush cosmetics, Tsachi Smart Foods and Patagonia, the eco-friendly outdoor clothing company.
While the rights granted to nature by Pittsburgh have never been overturned, they also haven’t been used to challenge any ordinances or development projects. Still, the measures are more than symbolic, said former Pittsburgh City Councilman Doug Shields, a backer of the rights-of-nature movement. They set legal boundaries that must be challenged in public court by polluters.
"It's like putting a chip on your shoulder: Go ahead and knock it off," Shields said. "You are going to start World War III."
The takeaway: Endowing nature with legal standing is a novel way to shift economic and legal incentives away from shorter-term corporate profits and toward conservation and public use.
—Bruce Ritchie