Thursday, October 8, 2009

GreenStreets: How Green is your Street?

A big part of Transition Town philosophy revolves around building communities and stimulating community action to lower our carbon footprints. But aside from our monthly meetings, our blog and the various activities we carry out, how can we engage the wider community more generally?
And perhaps most importantly, how can we show the progress we, as a community, are making?

One innovative method is GreenStreets, which acts to connect together neighbours and communities to promote living greener. Greenstreets uses its website to track the progress of members while also promoting neighbourhood interactions such as Greenstreet cafés where people can get together, meet other members in their community and learn about how other people are living more sustainably.

When new members sign into the Greenstreets website they calculate their “Greenstreet score” to see how sustainably they have been living, they are then able to compare their scores to that of their local street, suburb, state and country. By implementing some of the tips the site gives they can improve their score in the future and by encouraging their neighbours and friends to join they can get their local community engaged in lowering their impact and see the progress they are making.

GreenStreets is also for businesses, who can calculate their Green Street score and communicate with their customers what steps they are taking to green their business by using the social networking features of the website and by attending social get-togethers of site users.

Coming out of Samford village, Greenstreets is now attracting members from around the country, is free to join and also offers prizes!

To find out more or to join go to

Ps: To make signing up a little more attractive (and interesting) a packet of Timtams will be given to any household who bests my households’ GreenStreet score for September. (Nb: in the event there is more than one, it will go to the lowest scoring household). Winner to be decided at our next meeting but feel free to post your score in the comments. Good luck!

2 comments:

  1. hey Mike, I have decided moving house isn't good for your emissions:) This was an easy way to check your footprint. Thanks or the link. I will pop a date in my diary to do it again next month and see how we are progressing.
    Not too sure about the TimTams though, not local food and a fair bit of packaging :) Maybe the prize will be NOT to get them!

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  2. Yes, very true Carol. As far as sweets/bisuits go I can't really think of any that aren't highly processed, potentially trucked in from ages away and covered with mostly unrecyclable packaging.

    On the other hand I do think an ongoing prize for the lowest GSS to be decided at our meetings would be a nice touch.

    To everyone else, despite a valiant effort from Carol the environmentally unfriendly Tim Tams are still up for grabs!

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