PM Network - April 2009

A GREEN MACH I N E

Forget the steel factories and meatpacking plants. Chicago is forging a greener path.

The city has long offered tax breaks and limited grants to companies and individuals who “green” their building roofs—planting gardens or shrubbery to absorb solar radiation and reduce ambient heat. And Chicago now has 250-plus green roofs covering over 2. 5 million square feet (232,257 square meters)—more than any other city in the United States, according to Apollo Alliance, an environmental advocacy group. Chicago’s Millennium Park is also home to what’s believed to be the world’s largest green roof. Built over train tracks and an underground parking garage, half of the 24.5-acre (10-hectare) site is planted in grass, shrubs, trees and gardens.

Last year, the city took another big step, launching a comprehensive effort to reduce greenhouse gases to 25 percent below 1990 levels.

“This is an ambitious plan that contains many important ideas that will ensure Chicago continues to distinguish itself as an environmental role model for the rest of the nation,” Richard M. Daley,

the city’s mayor, said.

The Chicago Climate Action Plan outlines a roadmap of 29 actions for mitigating greenhouse gas in four areas: buildings, transportation, energy and waste pollution.

That list calls for plenty of green construction projects, including large-scale solar-energy installations at city facilities and publicly accessible alternative fueling stations.

The city’s chief environmental officer, Sadhu Johnston, told Crain’s Chicago Business that projects to retrofit old buildings to be more energy efficient represent a major opportunity for business and job growth. The plan mandates retrofitting some 400,000 residential units and 9,000 commercial and institutional buildings. Projects might include energy efficiency audits, solar panel installation and improved public transit.

Chicago city planners are also proposing a project to transform a former steel plant on the city’s south side into a green community. The goal is to redevelop more than 1,100 acres (445 hectares) into a new sustainable neighborhood with green buildings, a lakefront park and bicycle paths.

Yet the site presented some challenges.

Before 2005, it was covered in slag, a nontoxic byproduct of the steelmaking process. Nothing could grow on the rock-like material—which put a kink in the planners’ vision for a 17-acre lakeshore park. Illinois Department of Natural Resources scientists resolved the issue by dredging tons of excess sediment from the Illinois River and shipping it via barges to the future site of the park. Now the river sediment acts as the entire area’s topsoil and plants are growing there.