Eighteen years ago Santa Monica adopted the Sustainable City Plan, a challenging set of goals to ensure the long term sustainability of our local economy, environment and quality of life.  In order to track progress in meeting the Sustainable City Plan goals and to guide future actions the city releases the Sustainable City Report Card, a summary of the data in easy-to-understand grades, every two years. 

The 2012 Sustainable City Report Card (pdf) highlights improvements in almost every sustainability goal area and notes several successes over the past year:  

Compost Collection: The food waste composting program kept more than 4,000,000 pounds of food waste out of the landfill.

Diligent Disposal: Community members using the Household Hazardous Waste Programs kept nearly 250,000 pounds of hazardous materials and 32,000 pounds of household batteries out of the landfill.

Thriving Farmers Markets: Sales are up 5% at four thriving farmers' markets that provide fresh, locally grown produce to nearly a million visitors each year!

Total Trees:  An additional 1,384 new trees were added to the existing 34,500 public trees in Santa Monica's urban forest.

Housing Hope:  101 affordable housing units were completed and construction began on an additional 354 affordable housing units.

Homeless Help:  Project Homecoming helped 266 previously homeless individuals reunite with family and friends able to offer permanent housing and ongoing support.

Adding Arts: City Council approved the addition of an Arts and Culture Goal Area in the Sustainable City Plan.

"Beyond simply reporting grades, the Report Card is an opportunity to share some of the remarkable achievements made in the last year.  We encourage you to take a look at the Report Card because all members of the community need to be informed and engaged if we are going to meet our collective sustainable city goals." said Dean Kubani, the Director of the City's Office of Sustainability and the Environment.

Santa Monica's sustainability efforts were among the first of their kind in the nation and have served as a model for a growing number of cities, academic institutions and businesses.  Thanks to the city's leadership, the adoption of aggressive goals for sustainability and the careful tracking of progress are now widely practiced throughout the country.  "We're using the Report Card to guide our decision making," said Shannon Parry, Assistant Director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment.  "The successes highlighted in the Report Card show that Santa Monica is actively planting the seeds of change."

For more information on sustainability programming visit sustainablesm.org. 

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