Community Summit: The Greening of Roanoke

Last evening, the City of Roanoke held a community summit to discuss ways to reduce the carbon footprint of our community. The goal to reduce our footprint, which is the total amount of carbon pollution we put into the environment, is 10% for the community over the next five years and 12.5% for our municipal government.

After hearing from Sean McGinnis, Director of Green Engineering for Virginia Tech, about the various sorts of pollutants that contribute to our carbon footprint, we broke into roundtable groups to discuss ways to encourage our community to help achieve this 10% reduction goal.

Some of the ways our group came up with were: the use of public transportation as an alternative to single-car commutes, more recycling across the city amongst residents, the use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and the planting of more trees to increase our tree canopy, which is thought to help reduce pollution.

We had students from Patrick Henry, William Fleming as well as Virginia Western CC in attendance. It was really exciting to see the energy in the room and the willingness of folks to volunteer to help improve our environment by taking small steps locally to encourage better living that will reduce our carbon footprint.