Sydney

27 Feb 2008 With an aggressively pro-environmental mayor — Clover Moore, the first popularly elected female Lord Mayor of Sydney — Australia’s biggest city is poised to model sustainability for the rest of the drought-riddled continent. The challenge of the day: how to make a green-difference when your city has the highest per capita carbon emission output in the world?

The Hope

Sydney utilizes a-state-of-the-art waste recycling program called the Urban Resource, which creates energy by separating and cleaning the organic fraction of household waste, returning carbon to the earth. This process avoids dumping more than 70% of resource rich waste into landfills and has been cited by Greenpeace as the best of the best.

The High Bar

With disappointing public transit stats, and private car-use still rising, the city’s mass-transit is in need of expansion and upgrading. Lord Mayor Moore, who cycled with the mayor of Copenhagen at the last C40 conference, has implemented a plan to add some 55 kilometers of bike lanes to encourage two-wheeling, but some Sydneysiders (as residents are dubbed) are calling for better train lines with the added incentive of making public transit free.

The Hero

The Watershed Sustainability Resource is a city-government-funded, volunteer-run center which helps turn citizens of Sydney into environmentally proactive people and create new engaging initiatives. Thanks to many passionate people running around the Watershed, citizens of Sydney can now get professional advisory and referral services around all aspects of sustainable living, from architecture to responsible consumerism.

Links

• City of Sydney, Environment Website