Forest City Sustainability will make its largest impact through successful advancement of sustainability through the community. How we do this will require some compromise, a practice that will be repeated many times along the way. Some of the challenges are listed below.

Transportation: Forest City Sustainability does not own any vehicles - visits to clients will fall under the personal practices of the team members. In summary, ride a bicycle when safe and reasonable, minimize the total number of trips and plan the shortest distances. Choose electric when the time comes to replace a vehicle. The conscious decision to continue to operate a vehicle with an internal combustion engine is weighted by economic and by environmental considerations. Financially, even after considering the incentives and the fuel savings, it would be much less expensive to pay for offsets than to trade a car in good condition for a new EV. From an environmental perspective, a vehicle represents a kind of sunk environmental costs. Getting the maximum useful life of an existing vehicle defers the manufacturing environmental impacts of the new vehicle until it is needed.

Sustainable Business Directory: We struggled with the concept of having a printed version in addition to an on-line version. We believe that the printed version, when packaged within an almanac, will get more hits and will support itself financially through advertising. Our target audience is more likely to spend time with a paper copy than browsing online. We will evaluate paper sources as to their use of recycled material and commitment to sustainability. Paper is 100% renewable, but the energy associated with production and printing may require some assessment. Overall, we believe that the incremental impacts of having a paper version are overcome by the increased effectiveness of the mission: increased sustainability in our community.

Metrics: At this time we haven’t established carbon footprint metrics, but they will become more valuable over time, especially as we need to calculate offsets.

Offsets: Some small amount of effort has been applied to identify a meaningful way to compensate for any unavoidable carbon emissions associated with operating this business. Many potentially reputable offset providers have struggled to achieve additionality and effectiveness. There seem to be a limitless number of organizations willing to take cash for something that can’t readily be verified or regulated. Going forward, this will be an area of focus, for Forest City Sustainability, for us personally, and for our clients.

Give Back: Forest City Sustainability is not presently profitable. When that time comes, it would be entirely appropriate for the contribution of some of the profits back to organizations that are effective in helping to drive sustainability in the greater Rockford community.

Published 5/8/2023