New York City’s Greenest Launches Its First Sustainablity Plan

The Parks Department today released A Plan for Sustainable Practices within NYC Parks, the agency’s first comprehensive document highlighting its many sustainability-related projects. The plan also identifies new opportunities and sets clear goals to measure and promote sustainable practices throughout the agency. This inaugural version of the Plan will serve as a guide as the department designs and constructs parks, offers park programming, and conserves natural areas. It will also provide a platform for communicating our extensive work in this field. While Parks already embodies many sustainable practices, this Plan focuses on four main areas including education and outreach, public recycling, leaf composting, and park design and construction. The Plan includes case studies of actual practices and highlights employee efforts to create a greener workplace.

“The Parks Department’s Sustainability Plan brings together the many divisions within the agency to create a cohesive framework to share best practices and measure the fruits of our green efforts from stormwater capture on Greenstreets to emissions reduction to battery recycling,” said Commissioner Benepe. “We have already accomplished so much from establishing the greenest municipal vehicle fleet in the nation to collecting more than 500 pledges to ‘go green’ in the workplace. We like to think of our agency as ‘New York City’s Greenest,’ and our sustainability initiative is a call to action for all employees, one that we believe will carry over to patrons and the public at large who depend on our parks.”

In February 2010, Commissioner Benepe called for the creation of an intra-agency task force to create a Sustainability Plan. The Sustainable Parks Task Force brings together employees across the agency and is comprised of six working groups: metrics, training and education, public recycling, capital, leaf composting, and communications. Task force participants work in many divisions across the agency including forestry, operations, Urban Park Rangers and planning.

The Plan documents the creation and evolution of the Sustainability Task Force, and is a starting point for establishing a cohesive framework for sustainable practices as well as articulating our efforts to the public at large. This document is by no means an end in itself, just as sustainable practice is a constantly evolving and adaptive process. In many areas, planning has coincided with active implementation.

To view A Plan for Sustainable Practices within NYC Parks, please visit www.nyc.gov/parks, keyword: sustainable parks.

QUOTATION FOR THE DAY

“The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives.”

Native American Proverb

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