Reviewed by John Lowe
CH2M HILL

Sustainability is a defining concept for the mainstream environmental movement. Pollution prevention is a core practice for modern environmental management systems. The fusion of these two world-views would substantially change the way we solve many environmental problems. This report moves towards this fusion by introducing community sustainability activities to pollution prevention specialists, and by providing them with tools for incorporating sustainable community activities into pollution prevention practices. The report is one in a series of publications from the Critical Technologies Institute, a research center within RAND that has participated in the development of the National Environmental Technology Strategy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The report provides working definitions of sustainable community activities, describes the elements of a sustainable community activity, and presents examples of these activities in different communities, useful for individuals not familiar with sustainability concepts. It discusses briefly the relationship between sustainable community and pollution prevention activities, following with suggestions for using sustainable community activities to promote pollution prevention activities initiated by state and local governments. An annotated bibliography is provided with points of contact, documents and web pages about sustainable community activities.

While further work in this area remains to be done, the strength of this report is in showing there is merit by linking sustainable community and pollution prevention activities. There are some other ideas, not mentioned in the report, that pollution prevention specialists can use to create links with sustainable community activities. These include: showing the alignment between sustainability and environmental management systems (ISO14001) or "green design" philosophy; describing the benefits from incorporating sustainability community activities into corporate environmental reports; and exploring the relationship of sustainability to total cost accounting or life cycle analysis methods. The importance of these approaches is that they can be used to present sustainable community activities in terms that are familiar to various industries.

Companies need to look outward to their surrounding communities as they undertake pollution prevention, environmental management or sustainable development activities. This report will be of value to anyone working to build relationships between sustainable communities and the companies located in them.

John A. Lowe <jlowe@ch2m.com> is an Environmental Scientist at CH2M HILL, 2300 NW Walnut Blvd., Corvallis, OR 97330 USA. TEL: 541-758-0235 ext. 3630. FAX: 541-752-0276.