Green Alliance Helps Portsmouth Become More Sustainable

PORTSMOUTH — The Green Alliance is helping a city councilor encourage residents to adopt a series of “sustainable tips” that will make the community more eco-friendly. 

Councilor Brad Lown presented a list of “50 Sustainable Tips” to the Council Monday night. He developed them with help from the Green Alliance and the City of Portsmouth Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Sustainability. The Council accepted Lown’s report into its minutes, while Lown urged the council to use these tips daily. 

“The purpose of presenting the report was to generate a publicity, which is happening,” Lown said. And the Council responded “very well. People were interested in what I had to say.” 

He also wanted “to show residents that while every person makes a little difference by how they think and behave, together they can make a significant difference in the environment.” 

Lown, a member of the Sustainability Committee, which he said contained “a lot of talent and a lot of knowledge,” briefly summarized 25 of the 50 tips he had complied. Calling his tips “exhortations,” he said Tuesday that he wanted to “share information about the really good work that the committee is doing.” 

The Lown and Green Alliance sustainability tips include turning off lights and electric devices when leaving home, and using reusable bags when grocery shopping. Other tips include recycle as much as possible, plant trees, buy locally, regularly check automobile tire pressure, and buy reusable water bottles. 

The collaborative “50 Sustainability Tips” can be found on the City of Portsmouth Website by visiting http://www.cityofportsmouth.com/agendas/2013/citycouncil/cc080513cp.pdf. The sustainability tips are on pages 108-113. 

In an email sent to the Green Alliance, Lown thanked the organization for its assistance in developing his sustainability tips. Headquartered in Portsmouth and serving Northern New England, the Green Alliance is a union of local sustainable businesses promoting environmentally sound business practices and a green co-op offering discounted green products and services to its members. 

Green Alliance Executive Director Sarah Brown said the organization felt “much honored that City Councilor Brad Lown would come to us and ask us to contribute to these green tips. Luckily it’s something that we’ve been working on since our inception.” 

The Green Alliance supplies its own “Green Tips” for the 92.5 The River radio station, and develops its own “5 Green Tips” campaign, which goes out every week by email to the community as well as being published Mondays in the Portsmouth Herald. 

“Green Tips and little ideas about how people can live their lives more sustainably have always been an integral part of the Green Alliance,” Brown said. 

Lown said he gets the weekly Green Alliance “Green Tips” emails and reads the “5 Green Tips” in the Monday Herald. 

“That’s what gave me the idea,” he said about the Green Alliance’s “Green Tips” in promoting his “50 Sustainability Tips.” “I read these things, and they’re always interesting, useful, and thought-provoking. I saw one tip that explained that people should use car washes rather than washing their own cars, because car washes are more sustainable from a water-use perspective, something that was not evident to me.” 

Brown said the knowledge used to produce the Green Alliance’s “Green Tips” “is the collective knowledge of the Green Alliance organization — 115 businesses with whom the Green Alliance works as partners. “We get our knowledge from our business partners,” she said. 

For example, Brown said, when Green Alliance staffers visit a business-partner restaurant, they will ask about “some little things that the restaurant does on a daily basis to be more green.” The Green Alliance collects and disseminates the ideas. 

“This is a collaborative body of knowledge that comes from all these local green businesses that are sharing what has worked for them,” Brown said. “And we’re really excited to see the city of Portsmouth officially acknowledging that everybody needs to be lessening their impact on the environment, taking environmentalism to next level.” 

She added: “It’s one thing for organizations like the Green Alliance and green businesses to be doing it, but when a municipality takes notice, the municipality is making adopting sustainable practices a priority. That’s really exciting.”