Sustainability

2014 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Sustainability Report Card Category Local Trend National Comparison Air Quality B C Energy Use A C Equity/Empowerment C C Food D C Jobs/Income C C Land Use D D Transportation B D Waste B – Water Use B B Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s first comprehensive sustainability report card is in, and the results are mixed. The […]

Back in the woods off N.C. 49, the winding blacktop ends beside a greenhouse. Thomas Gentry, a UNC Charlotte architecture professor, is watering tomatoes on a humid July afternoon. A man in a work truck creeps along the gravel drive. “The power back on?” he asks, pulling next to the greenhouse. Gentry nods. “Good.” It’s […]

The KEEPING WATCH initiative, a three-year collaboration of historians, writers, artists, scientists and environmental experts, has gained more funding support. The Charlotte Mecklenburg Community Foundation awarded UNC Charlotte’s College of Arts + Architecture $10,000 to support the program. The initiative – whose key partners at the College of Arts + Architecture and the UNC Charlotte […]

A 10-foot-wide asphalt path that officially opened Tuesday offers a glimpse of what could be a more pedestrian- and bike-oriented future for some of Charlotte’s least pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. The path, 0.9 miles along University City Boulevard from Mallard Creek Church Road to UNC Charlotte’s main entrance at Broadrick Boulevard, is the first bike-ped trail along […]

When you hear that a new book “opens my eyes to an entirely new way of thinking,” as “Better! Cities & Towns” editor Rob Steuteville wrote, you may want to pay attention. Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, by Benjamin Ross (Oxford University Press, 2014) has the potential to change the […]

Americans use an average of 60,000 plastic bags every minute – single-use disposable bags that we mindlessly throw away. It takes an estimated 12 million barrels of oil a year to make the plastic bags that Americans consume. And that’s just bags. Plastics surround us. Although Mecklenburg County now accepts most types of plastics for […]

Recycling containers sit in classrooms in every Charlotte-Mecklenburg public school, and students at nearly half of them make the extra effort to dump leftover liquid from milk and juice cartons before tossing them into bins. “The recycling systems are in place in the schools,” says Laurette Hall, environmental manager for Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Services, […]

In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, local ordinances do not require all businesses to recycle, and even when large companies provide space for employees to toss materials into bins, officials are unable to determine how much they recycle. In Charlotte and the county’s six towns, there is no requirement that apartments, townhouses, condos and other multifamily communities provide on-site […]

Shredded paper Paper is a popular recycling item so it may seem a bit puzzling that shredded paper is on the do-not-toss list for your curbside recycling bin. It’s just too small for the sorting machines used at Mecklenburg’s recycling processing facility. It can be composted, put in the recycling container at your grocery store […]

When you hear “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night … ” you probably think of the U.S. Postal Service. But if you found yourself around Plaza Midwood on one of this past winter’s cold and snowy Tuesday nights, you may well associate that phrase with something else: hardy bicyclists pedaling despite […]