San Francisco shows what 'going green' really means
October 20, 2009 | Length: 00:02:46
San Francisco, with a 72% recycling rate and a goal of zero waste to landfill by 2020, is being called one of the 'greenest cities' in the U.S. Jared Blumenfeld, director of the department of the environment talks about some of the projects, including an interactive map that helps users understand their carbon footprint and a solar mashup that enables citizens to price out the cost of installing solar on building rooftops.
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>> Jered Blumenfeld: My name is Jared Blumenfeld. I'm the Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment.
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>> What we do every single day is work with San Franciscan's both at home, in their businesses, city government to try and get them to think about how to be more sustainable. Really our biggest challenge in San Francisco is the same challenge that we face globally which is climate change and for San Francisco the majority of our emissions come from people driving, then from our buildings, and then from people not recycling properly. And so if we can come up with practical solutions in San Francisco those solutions can then be exported and replicated in Miami, in Madagascar, all around the planet. One of the big things that San Francisco is doing is recycling. We're at 72% recycling rate. We've got the goal of getting to 0 waste to landfill, absolutely nothing going to landfill by 2020.
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>> Jered Blumenfeld: We also have about 490 tons of food scraps everyday that are collected in San Francisco from restaurants that are turned into compost. We need to do things radically different. Technology is gonna help us get there. One of the new technologies that we've come up with is called theurbanecomap.org and the eco map shows every single zip codes CO2 production by transportation, by energy use and recycling. So you can start to drill down and then we give them the tools to help deal with that. Solar power is a key to San Francisco's future and to every cities future. One of the things that confuse San Francisco residents is they've never looked at their roof tops so we took pictures of San Francisco integrated it with Google maps and now you can type in any San Francisco address and you can see your solar potential, how much money you can save and it directly puts you in touch with an installer. Ultimately the destiny of the planet is in the hands of decision makers and cities. Cities need to become significantly greener than they are today and one of the tings that San Francisco is doing is setting ambitious targets to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We set ambitious targets for our buildings. We now need to meet those targets and that's gonna be a combination of technology and behavior change.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====