Sustainable Sweden: The Natural Step topic of Alliance for Sustainablity conference
The County Journal
Last Updated: Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 05:33:15 PM
http://www.washburnwi.com/placed/index.php?sect_rank=1&story_id=193904ASHLAND — Sustainable Sweden: The Natural Step” will be the topic of a Feb. 25-27 conference to be held at Ashland’s new AmericInn conference center. Initiated by the Alliance for Sustainability, 12 governmental, educational and entrepreneurial co-sponsors have subsidized their constituencies to attend the conference.
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“I was astounded to learn that over 60 towns and cities in Sweden have adopted systems-wide approaches to reducing and minimizing their impact on climate change. Some communities have reduced their dependency on fossil fuels from 80 percent to 20 percent.”
Case examples from Sweden include the town of Overtornea’s 100 percent conversion to renewable energy, the City of Umea’s heat and power plant fueled entirely by the city’s own solid waste; GreenZone sustainable business park, Lovikka village’s 90 percent community recycling rate; Shanga Saby, a convention center that creates only one cubic yard of trash for the landfill in 13 months and a remarkable 2,000 unit residential development in Stockholm featuring gree roofs, innovative urban infiltration systems and buses and stoves that ran on biogas from food waste.
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