EDITORIAL / ANNE BARRON

How green can Highland Park go?

How green?

This is the challenge confronting Green Highland Park, an effort by the Borough to encourage sustainable living among residents, businesses and civic groups. The "greening" of Highland Park has a monetary focus as well, through a number of cost-saving green measures that should reduce municipal costs in the long run.

This of course will require the buy-in of everyone who either lives in, works in, or visits the borough. The Green Project has begun to reach out to neighbors and visitors in a number of ways.

Green discussion forum now online

Homeowners looking for green alternative to home remodeling? Gardeners looking for native landscaping? You can get help at the HIGHLAND PARK GREEN Discussion Forum, now live at http://greenhp.org/. This project came out of a request by the local environmental group SaveOpenSpace to support residents seeking alternatives to traditional, less environmentally friendly methods of building and landscaping.

Planners at the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute (NJSSI) launched the forum to help residents ask questions, share information and experiences. You can join the discussion by clicking on "register" at http://greenhp.org/forum.

Green Community Plan -- now in development

Borough officials have called in NJSSI and created the town's Green Community Working Group (GCWG) to work jointly on the Green Community Plan. This plan in development points to action items for all stakeholders, including the municipal government, residents, businesses, and religious and civic organizations.

The goal is to publicize the Plan through "Green Challenges," whereby our community is challenged to reach numerical targets on a specific green initiative. This year's green challenges:

• reduce our waste production by 10 per cent;
• reduce CO2 emissions by signing up for the Clean Power Choice program at the BPU (Board of Public Utitlities) website;
• increase the number of certified 'backyard habitats'.

(The backyard habitat is an effort of the World Wildlife Federation; see more at www.wwf.org.)

To date, 450 Highland Park residents have taken the first Green Challenge, exchanging a traditional incandescent light bulb for a compact fluorescent bulb (CFB). Compact fluorescents use 20% less energy and can last ten times longer. Assuming that in Highland Park you pay about 11.91 cents/kW-hour for electricity, Environmental Defense estimates that replacing one 60-watt bulb with a CFB will save you $32. in electric bills. Better still, 205 pounds of CO2 will be prevented from entering the atmosphere. One note of caution: compact fluorescents cannot be disposed of in normal trash, since they contain small amounts of toxic mercury. Please dispose of them at the monthly Middlesex County Hazardous Waste collection days.

The Highland Park Green Community Working Group meets monthly at the Eugene Young Environmental Center on River Road. The next meetings are November 14 and December 12, at 7:30 PM. The greening of borough ordinances and the fine-tuning of the Green Plan are on the agenda.

We will also be working on a borough-wide Free-Cycle day planned for early April. Initiated by resident Marc Laurano and his family, this free event is dedicated to trading un-needed items between townspeople rather than dumping into our landfills. You can find more information at www.greenhp.org.

sustainable 1 : capable of being sustained; 2 a : of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged <sustainable techniques>

Anne Barron is a member of the Highland Park Green Community Working Group.