Big Ideas for the Triangle’s Climate Future

As we put together the INDY’s Earth Day edition, local headlines warned of record high temperatures for this time of year in the week ahead. You’d be forgiven for getting a sense of déjà vu; last year saw central North Carolina’s hottest summer on record. That was, of course, the same summer we experienced historic flooding due to Tropical Storm Chantal. And this past winter saw plenty of ink spilled lamenting a trend of declining snowfall in the Triangle.

Climate change can feel at once inescapable and intangible, a problem too ubiquitous and too abstract to address. But if we have any chance at avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes of a warming planet, we can’t resign ourselves to thinking there is nothing we can do about it.

So we sought out locals who work or advocate in fields that intersect with the environment—from farming to urban planning—and asked them one question: What is your big idea for the Triangle’s climate future? We encouraged these experts to think beyond the confines of the status quo, set aside questions of political and financial will, and allow themselves to dream up solutions to pressing climate problems.

Here we share their big ideas for making the Triangle a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable place.

Big Idea: Set It on Fire

Wake County’s 1.2 million residents collectively produce a staggering 2.3 billion pounds of waste each year. Some of that gets reused or recycled, but most of it goes into the South Wake Landfill in Apex, where it’s smushed into a giant mound and left to decompose very, very slowly. 

The sprawling 180-acre landfill is going to be full by 2045 (maybe sooner), and Wake County leaders are actively debating what to do when that happens. 

They could choose to build a new landfill. But there are a limited number of available sites in fast-growing Wake that offer at least 400 acres sufficiently far from airports, flood zones, water supply watersheds, and historic sites. Or they could opt to haul our waste far away to a bigger, privately owned landfill, like Durham County does. But most regional landfills are expected to fill up around the same time as Wake’s. 

John Roberson, Wake County’s solid waste director, thinks we should strongly consider a third option: building a waste-to-energy (WTE) facility to burn our trash and generate power.

“You’re incinerating that trash with modern technology that minimizes the health impact from the burning and, from that process, creating power that you can then put back on the grid,” Roberson explained.

There are only about 66 WTE facilities in the U.S., compared to 542 active landfills. But in other parts of the world—especially places where open space is in short supply, like Japan and Europe—WTE is becoming the norm.

Roberson is aware that “incineration has a bad name, if you will,” because early WTE facilities in the 1970s were basically unregulated and posed serious health and environmental risks. But the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds. Modern WTE plants filter dust, gases, metals, and other pollutants out of the exhaust that leaves the facility and recover recyclable metals from the leftover ash. All told, they produce less local air pollution than greenhouse-gas-emitting landfills. And per Wake County’s calculations, a facility processing 3,000 tons of trash per day could generate 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 74,000 homes.

Check out Wake County’s Beyond the South Wake Landfill Study for more information about the landfill and WTE. —CCB

Big Idea: Healthy Brains

As CEO of Happy Dirt, Sandi Kronick describes herself as the “middlewoman” between farmers and consumers, restaurants, and supermarkets wanting to buy organically grown food. What started in 2004 as a Durham-based wholesale food vendor has since expanded to distribute produce across the continent.

If given unlimited money, Kronick would set out to make food, nutrition, and agriculture part of the basic education for Durham’s youth. Food systems, from production to disposal, are tied to nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations, which means teaching young people more about where their food comes from and how to eat better is also good for the environment.

Kronick envisions field trips to farms and landfills, a partnership with Durham’s chefs to educate and inspire students, and a program to “ensure that every kid knows that how they feel matters, and that how they feel is partially affected by what they put in their bodies, and that they should be able to make the choices that help them feel great.”

Kronick said she would also start an entrepreneurial program, where students could solve food and nutrition challenges within the school system.

At the end of the school day, parents picking up their children could also grab affordable, healthy, ready-to-go meals. 

“We’re all committed to, especially, sending young kids off thriving out into the world,” Kronick said. “And that just means that they know that they can dream, that they know that they have opportunities. And no matter what you’re passionate about, you need a healthy brain. And in order to have a healthy brain, you need to be able to access healthy food.”—KT

Big Idea: Solarize the Schools 

Carina Barnett-Loro, a longtime Durham resident, has spent her career advocating and organizing around climate and clean energy. She joined a campaign pushing the Durham City Council and County Commission to adopt renewable energy commitments. As a result, they committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

But her action didn’t stop there. Barnett-Loro serves on the Environmental Affairs Board that advises the city and county on anything from watershed protection to environmental education. 

A Durham Public Schools and Duke University graduate, Barnett-Loro’s big idea takes on the public school system.

Barnett-Loro said she would focus on four areas: financing energy efficiency retrofits to decrease electricity use; installing solar panels on rooftops so they can serve as “resilience hubs” for the surrounding community in case of a storm; deploying electric school buses; and using solar panel installations and maintenance as a job opportunity and an economic development driver for students. 

“These schools are a natural place to start in terms of both having incredible opportunities and infrastructure for implementing clean energy and climate solutions,” Barnett-Loro said. “And then also just really prioritizing students across our community.”

These points are also part of policies that local group A Green New Deal for Durham has proposed, and some of them are already in action. Lyons Farm Elementary School has a 220-kilowatt solar panel system, and Durham is receiving 38 electric school buses, 

Barnett-Loro noted. Having a sister who teaches fourth grade has made her think about how public schools and environmental initiatives can interact, she said. It’s a way to capitalize on existing infrastructure to create a better future. 

“Obviously Durham’s growing really rapidly, and has been for a while, and that growth presents challenges, but it also prevents a lot of opportunities to identify and layer in climate solutions,” Barnett-Loro said. —KT

Big Idea: Green Police

Day to day, Durham resident Aidil Ortiz practices environmental sustainability in small, mindful ways: She keeps her neighborhood’s yard sale map up to date. She maintains her home, a historic structure built in the early 1900s, with repairs that preserve the original materials. She opts for refurbished goods.

“I don’t buy the new iPhone when it comes out,” Ortiz said. “That’s a no-no to me.”

A community organizer, Ortiz also rallies her neighbors to advocate for stronger environmental accountability from local government.

But there’s only so much she can do as one person. Her big idea? Environmental investigators embedded in the police department who go after businesses that harm the health of local residents.

To Ortiz, environmental harm is just as big a threat to Durhamites’ well-being as violent crime or theft, if not more.

“The people stealing our health, stealing our wellness—like, safety is defined to me in that way as well,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz acknowledged that environmental testing takes time. But she alleged that there’s a troubling gap between how quickly authorities act on individual code violations and how quickly they move on industrial ones. Once, when she called the city about a neighbor keeping a rooster in violation of city code, an inspector showed up immediately, notice in hand, Ortiz said. She wants to see that same energy directed at industrial polluters.

“Y’all are creative about fighting roosters,” Ortiz said, “but you’re not creative about fighting businesses that are harming your residents.” —LG

Big Idea: “If You Build It, They Will Come”

UNC-Chapel Hill professor Danielle Spurlock’s work sits at the intersection of environment, equity, and land use. In her “dream world,” these things come together via a regional, multimodal transit system that gets Triangle residents anywhere they need to go without a car. 

There are a lot of reasons our current infrastructure isn’t creating this transit utopia, Spurlock noted. Gaps in public transit service and sidewalks can make it difficult to commute to work without a car, much less drop your kids off on the way in or pick up groceries on the way home.

“Sometimes it’s distance,” Spurlock said. “There’s just not a pathway there. There’s timing. There’s ‘Once I get there, if I’m all sweaty, where do I shower?’ Particularly with caregiving parents, whether I’m caring for elders or caring for small children—one, it tends to be very gendered, who takes care of those groups, and then their travel pathways aren’t very conducive to how public transit works. I can’t, you know, stack a lot of trips very easily.”

But big investments in transit typically require demonstrating that ridership exists to support it—based on how people are using transit systems that currently aren’t enticing everyone to (figuratively and literally) get on board.

“If we could build massive, integrated public transit, and didn’t have to worry about ‘Well, is the demand already there?’ We have to often show that there’s demand for it before it gets built, versus if we build it, they will come,” she says. “We’d have better-connected sidewalks, we’d have more public transit. We’d have really great bus shelters. We don’t have to just choose light rail or bus rapid transit.” —SW

Big Idea: Use What We’ve Got

Asked to dream big, Lauren Grove, like Spurlock, thought of a regional public transit network connecting Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill.

Even in a hypothetical world with no limits, her mind kept drifting to the constraints. That’s just what happens after years of working in local government, Grove said, with a laugh. As the city of Durham’s “Vision Zero” coordinator, tasked with building a strategy to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2045, her default is one of operating within tight boundaries.

But what Grove had once thought would be a big obstacle to regional transit—building new infrastructure—actually wasn’t one. The bones are already there, she said.

“We already have the major arterials and the state routes to connect the Triangle,” Grove said, pointing to U.S. 70, N.C. 501, and N.C. 54. Since those corridors sit at street level rather than on elevated highways, Grove explained, some of their lanes could easily be reconfigured into dedicated routes for bus or rail service. 

The place to potentially invest in new construction would be along those routes; with ample right of way available, the state could line them with tree canopies and wide paths for biking and walking.

Building those paths would require pouring more concrete, which might seem counterintuitive in the name of sustainability, Grove said. But she sees the trade-off as negligible.

“It’s quite nominal to the offset that you would get with more people walking and biking,” she said. —LG

Melissa McCullough, a first-term Chapel Hill Town Council member and a former EPA scientist, also proposed making the most of the transit infrastructure we’ve got. On a phone call after a transit meeting, she pitched her big idea: connecting Durham and Chapel Hill via bus rapid transit (BRT) to help residents get around without a car.

“It’s an air quality issue, it’s a climate gasses issue, it’s an equity issue, because it costs about $14,000 a year to own a car. And when you make it possible for people to get to their jobs [even] if they can’t drive a car, then you create the ability for people to have jobs.”

BRT is already underway around the Triangle. The first of four planned corridors in Wake County is under construction. Chapel Hill’s will run down Martin Luther King Boulevard. Durham is in the process of planning routes between Duke and East Durham. 

McCullough wants to connect Durham and Chapel Hill via 15-501 (aka Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard aka the storied Tobacco Road).

“That is our biggest commuting route,” said McCullough. “And the traffic is terrible … and trying to bike on it or walk is impossible.”

BRT is really just a bus system that is fast and consistent enough for people to rely on it. McCullough said that the environmental impact is obvious: Fewer cars on the road means less emissions. And even if you don’t take the bus, you’d probably appreciate less traffic.

“And it affects quality of life,” said McCullough. “Because if you look at happiness reports, one of people’s most hated things is commuting.” —CP

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