Enviornmental priorities for Southern Village and environs

Paul ROWE, of Southern Village, has told me that he is putting together some sort of a "Green Team" for Southern Village either as part of the Southern Village Homeowners Association or tied to it in some way. It's not clear to me yet what they hope to accomplish.

Here are some to the ideas that I intend to share with them (and I hope to edit this in coming days):

• Work with PSNC, Duke Energy and OWASA to see if we can learn the total energy consumption for Southern Village and environs going back several years and then let's work to reduce it.
• Ask Chape Hill Transit for ridership numbers (I am not sure how they do this) for the V and NS lines for the last several years, and I think there are one or two others that come to Southern Village, and then seek to increase those passenger numbers.
• Ask the relevant people in Orange County and maybe Chapel Hill for the total amount of non-recyclable garbage we produce, again going back several years. Let's set a target to reduce it.
• Find out the amount of recycling for the last several years, and then figure out if we want to set a target higher, the same or less. Recycling is good if it comes from necessary items that otherwise would have gone to the garbage, but it is bad if people are accumulating more "stuff" that comes in packaging that gets discarded.
• Do an area census of all homeowners to ask how many have and use composters; do we have a community compost bin for those in homes with no place to use the compost?