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In a “normal” year this would be the time to do your last minute shopping, travel to see family,  and start celebrating with big family dinners and parties. But this year has been unlike any other: a global pandemic, social unrest,  the imminent effects of a changing climate and so much more. Although all of these challenges might sound unrelated to you, social, racial and environmental issues are intrinsically connected and this year has brought us the opportunity to start seeing those connections more clearly. So what if we used this Holiday season to recalibrate? To evaluate our priorities? Our [...]

Sustainable San Mateo welcomed Joe La Mariana, Executive Director at RethinkWaste, to its eighth Happy Hour on the evening of September 30. RethinkWaste is a standalone public agency and a $140M/year operation in the Bay Area. The agency owns and manages the Shoreway Environmental Center in San Carlos. The Center receives all the recyclables, green waste and garbage collected from the 12 local government jurisdictions which formed RethinkWaste more close to 40 years ago. In addition, RethinkWaste advocates for environmental best practices and waste reduction strategies through policy, legislation and education.  Not much was left uncovered by Joe LaMariana [...]

Kirsten Andrews-Schwind, Senior Manager of Community Relations at Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE),* joined us during one of our monthly Happy Hour online discussions on July 29 to talk about energy resilience in the county, a hot topic especially as we move into wildfire season.Last fall PG&E had several public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) in order to prevent wildfires from being started by electrical equipment. The shutoffs affected more than 3 million California residents and caught many by surprise.While PCE has no control over PSPS events or maintaining the power grids, it has committed $10 million toward programs that will help [...]

Rev. Kirsten Snow Spalding of Ceres, the guest presenter at Sustainable San Mateo County’s Virtual Happy Hour on August 27, said current trends influencing sustainable investment include fossil fuel divestment from individual portfolios, engaging with heavy-emitting companies to move them to become more sustainable and focusing on private equity. Rev. Spalding is Senior Program Director, Investor Network, at Ceres. In this capacity, she engages with a network of over 175 institutional investors with more than $30 trillion in assets under management. Investors in her network include insurance companies, university endowments, banks and pension funds. As Rev. Spalding sees it, there are two [...]

Centralized or decentralized? Purple pipes or potable reuse? Five weeks ago, this would have sounded like the oddest game of “Would You Rather” I’d ever played. But learning about the conversations Bay Area cities, organizations and engineers are having about the future of our water supply has felt like being introduced to a new world! This summer I’ve been conducting water sustainability research for Sustainable San Mateo County (SSMC), a nonprofit partnering with local cities and businesses to further environmental, economic and social sustainability. I’m one of four interns working to expand SSMC’s Sustainability Ideas Bank, a database of sustainability [...]