As part of the commercial practice that we do here at Team Reba we have memberships to many commercial online services, such as CoStar. In a recent email newsletter an article came up about the Green Restaurant Association which outlines many of the steps that restaurants that are involved with this association are doing to help provide an environmentally friendly business ranging from building design and utility usage to what kinds of cups might be used.
Within the same page of this article are some add-on “green” articles including a town in Kansas that seeks to be the first Platinum LEED certified city. I was shocked they didn’t go for the kitschy title of “Greensburg – we know Green” or something similar. You might recall Greensburg, the city of 4000 residents that was virtually wiped out by a cat-5 tornado last year. This town is nearby where my family lives, in Wichita, and several of my friends from there and in Newton (where I grew up between ages 6-17) have been part of the rebuilding process. What will be interesting to see is whether or not some of the building practices that are put into the new city buildings become more commonly used in other construction projects and if the builders that perform the work take their new methods back to places like Wichita – a much larger city of around 350,000 residents. Personally, I’d love to see more of these kinds of practices used in Wichita. As a part time resident of the city I’ve been shocked that other small townships like Newton have adopted mandatory recycling efforts but that Wichita has not. I’d like to see them get more environmentally friendly and the sooner, the better.
