Mayor Dean's environmental pledge

Mayor Karl Dean is encouraging Nashvillians to follow his lead in making our city a more ecologically friendly place to live. Here are more details from the mayor:

I have made a commitment to make Nashville “the greenest city in the Southeast.” Being green is about being a city that is clean, healthy and environmentally sustainable. Most importantly, it’s about being a city that continues to be a great place for you and your family to live, work and play.

Many of you want to know what you can do to help make our city green. The most important thing you can do as an individual is to make easy changes in your every day life to reduce energy use, reduce waste and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that go into our air.

Today I am asking you to commit to five small actions that can have a big collective impact on our environment. Please take my Environmental Pledge. By taking the pledge, together all Nashvillians will be able to:

• Save enough kilowatt-hours to power 5,260 households
• Conserve enough water in a year to fill LP Field four times
• Eliminate the equivalent of 5,800 cars from the road every year
• Eliminate as much carbon dioxide as the trees on 4,652 acres of undeveloped land every year
• Eliminate 120 million plastic bags and over 2 million pounds of waste every year

The pledge is online at www.nashville.gov/green. Once you take the pledge, you’ll be able to see a running total of how many Nashvillians have taken the pledge and the combined impact all of your actions will have on our environment. Go online and take the Environmental Pledge today.

Thank you for helping make Nashville green.