The City of New Westminster is creating its first sustainability plan, dubbed Envision 2032. The year 2032 is one generation from now – a length of time that is easy for people to imagine when making decisions that affect the future. You can provide feedback via an online survey (which closes on March 15).

New Westminster’s 2012-2014 Strategic Plan focused on building a high and sustainable quality of life for its residents and called for the creation of a sustainability framework, or “Sustainability Lens,” to “guide and test all future decisions and initiatives against balanced economic, social/cultural and environmental perspectives.” The next step is visioning and creating a concise set of statements that describe the desired future in key policy areas. This will be the focus of the Envision 2032 Sustainability Fair events being held at the Inn at the Quay on the evening of Friday, November 2nd and the morning of Saturday, November 3rd.

Did you know that New Westminster hosts an annual documentary film festival? The second annual New West DocFest is coming up this weekend, October 19 & 20, at Douglas College’s Laura C. Muir Theatre.

The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is taking place in New Westminster Sunday, September 23rd. Take part!

Opinion polling in New Westminster is pretty clear: New Westminster does not want a six-lane replacement to the Pattullo Bridge. TransLink’s public consultation in our community, however, has assumed six lanes as a given. Clearly, New West and TransLink are not seeing eye to eye. New Westminsterites concerned about air quality, livability, pedestrian safety and environmental impacts of increasing traffic through our already congested city have organized a rally for the whole family in response to TransLink’s Pattullo Bridge Open House at Sapperton Pensioner’s Hall this Saturday, June 23.

In my ignorant pre-gardening days, I extended my politically correct Canadian sensitivity training to the world of flora and fauna. I admired the spunk of dandelions growing in the crack between the sidewalk and the curb, the beauty of the morning glories twining in the hedge and the hardiness of blackberry bushes crowding parked cars in the back lane. I felt guilty pulling weeds. After all, didn’t they have just as much right to life as any other plant?

The other day I noticed a bunch of Canadian geese down at the Fraser River Styrofoam patch. Why, I wondered, would they prefer to toddle here rather than fly south for the winter? More importantly, I wondered why was no one cleaning this mess up. I decided to take a half hour out of my day and putting it toward my own personal community initiative. I was going to pick up garbage and report my findings.

Never heard of energy resiliency or energy transition planning?  Neither had I until a few weeks ago, however will become a growing topic of importance in New Westminster over the coming years.
New Westminster Environmental Partners (NWEP) would like to invite the public to learn more at a forum on Energy Resiliency and Energy Transition Planning on Monday December 5th. This forum will be preceded by the NWEP’s Annual General Meeting and election of directors for 2012. The AGM will start at 6:00 with the public forum presentations starting after 6:30pm. …

This is the third in a series of articles sharing highlights from NWEP’s mayor and council candidates questionnaire on environmental issues. While we shared the candidates’ opinions on traffic issues in our last post in this series, it’s worth taking a little more time to discuss one issue in particular that could have a profound impact on traffic flow in New Westminster: the proposed replacement of the Pattullo Bridge.

New Westminster Environmental Partners, in partnership with Tenth to the Fraser, asked all the mayoral and council candidates about environmental issues. NWEP has each candidate’s complete answers on their website, and we will be publishing highlights from the responses over the next week or so. We will begin with the mayoral candidates’ takes on sustainability: how to define the term, local successes and missed opportunities.

On Sunday, September 25, the Carter Foreshore Park and the South Dyke Road from Gifford Street to Boundary Road in Queensborough were targeted for cleanup by 28 people who participated in the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. Even though downpours occurred just before and after, the event was rain free. Collecting approximately 95 kg of litter was a bittersweet moment for participants.

On October 21 and 22, New Westminster will be the place to be for documentary film, with the launch of the first annual New West Doc Fest at Douglas College. A fundraiser to help with the cost of running this festival is coming up on September 28th at Heritage Grill.

When I was young and living in Alberta in the 1980’s, I belonged to the Dairy 4-H Club. One of our big projects every year was Highway Clean-up. We picked up garbage on the side of the Highway for probably about 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon. It was amazing to see the amount of garbage that littered the side of the road. Fast forward to 2011. Have we as humans learned our lesson about littering? It seems that we as a collective whole have not. That is why The Vancouver Aquarium partnered with TD Canada Trust and started the Great Canadian Shoreline Clean-up, happening this weekend in New Westminster and beyond.

The front-page article on today’s Newsleader is about New Westminster’s new green bin program. According to the article, with the introduction of a dedicated waste bin for food scraps, New Westminster has gone from having a 31 per cent rate of diverting waste from the landfill in 2009 to 59 per cent in the last three months of 2010. How do you like the green bin program? What do you do to reduce trash? How do you think New West could further reduce garbage sent to the landfill?

TransLink has been undergoing a “service rationalization” process for the past year. This is part of a complete service review the Provincial government has mandated before any consideration is given to approving other revenue streams for TransLink. Until now, this has been a fairly abstract concept when it came to transit services on the road, however as we are about to learn, “rationalization” means cuts to basic services in New Westminster.

The issue of garbage and recycling rates in multi-family dwellings is finally being addressed by Metro Vancouver.
The region’s Zero Waste targets are for 70% trash diversion by 2015. Single family homes are well on their way with 55% diversion, but multi-family lags far behind with an estimated 16% diversion. So why such a disparity from multi-family to single-family?

For those who haven’t yet heard, Translink is back with a new round of consultations on the Highway Nobody Wants.  The first in a series of United Boulevard Extension workshops is this Saturday, 9:30am-12pm at the Sapperton Pensioners Hall, 318 Keary Street.

Can the North Fraser Perimeter Road, creating a four lane truck route through New Westminster even be built? Let’s examine the feasibility of the City’s mitigation wish list.

We won; we stopped the flood gates of the United Boulevard Extension from opening and releasing the hordes of new commuter traffic on to already chocked New Westminster streets. Or did we?

The Clean Bin Project started as a blog about a friendly competition between some roommates to produce no garbage. The Project has a great blog that is still ongoing even after the initial year is finished, and has evolved into a must-see comedic documentary about our impact on the fragile rock we call Earth. Here’s the trailer:
The Clean Bin Project – Trailer from Grant Baldwin Videography on Vimeo.
This is an amazing film and it’s coming to it’s first ever screening in New Westminster on Saturday February 5th as part …

Maybe you’re tired of paying $6 for free-range eggs (that might not be so free-range), or perhaps you want an unusual backyard inhabitant. Regardless, we seem to be in the age of the urban chicken, though to date it seems to be more talk than action; most backyards in New Westminster seem to be distressingly poultry free.
New Westminster, unlike Vancouver, has had a by-law on the books regulating the keeping of chickens   since the late 1960s (bylaw 4271, drafted in 1967 and passed in 1968).
The by-laws are a little restrictive …

The New Westminster Environmental Partners will be holding an Urban Transportation Forum and Annual General Meeting on November 9 at the Douglas College Student Union lounge. The event, moderated by Tenth to the Fraser Will & Briana Tomkinson, will feature local and regional transportation experts discussing what works in transportation planning, what doesn’t, and what’s coming to New Westminster.

In this city of hills, you really can travel uphill both ways. So it’s perhaps surprising that New Westminster has such a strong, passionate cycling community. While it is hilly, our city is both compact and central – features that lend themselves to bike commuting. Now City Hall too is sharing the velolove.

Green Drinks is a monthly meeting of people interested in sustainability and the environment, and is usually free of themes or agendas. This week, however, there’s a special focus on Metro Vancouver’s ‘Zero Waste Challenge.’

This is a guest post from Pat Johnstone, President of the New Westminster Environmental Partners. NWEP is looking for new members, volunteers and community allies. In Pat’s words, here’s a summary about NWEP and what they do. If you’re interested in learning more, the next regular meeting of the New Westminster Environmental Partners will take place at New West Public Library at 7pm on Wednesday April 14th.