Business & Politics

So you work in the US government at a state or local level and want a peek at what tools your contemporaries across the country are working with. Where would you go looking? No further than SustainLane. What is it? An “open-source knowledge base speeds discovery, research and networking with more than 75 best practice documents and a secure directory of participating government officials from over 180 cities, counties and states.” Its the site you visit to find out that Florida have a Pay-As-You-Throw protocol, that San Francisco publishes a document entitled ‘Alternatives to Arsenic Treated Wood’, where you learn that Denver has a policy on installing LED Traffic Lights and that Minneapolis requires low environmental impact cleaning practices for all office space leased by the City. Locating the papers is made easier by separating them into 13 categories like: Parks/Open Space/Habitat, Food/Agriculture and Climate Change Policy. And just to show governments can move with the times, they’ve got their own blog. Though the link to it on the home page initially gave our browser the willies, we eventually got there and found a story about Chicago-based design firm, UrbanLabs, winning a competition by designing a John Todd style Living Machine for the whole of Chicago! And they also have a post on the Top Ten Green Cities in the USA. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks. ::SustainLane.