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EPA Challenges America's Leaders to Develop Conservation Projects
EPA gathered key leaders from across the country this month and challenged them to forge new, innovative ways to conserve our valuable resources through waste reduction, energy recovery and reduction of chemical use.
The audience included state, local and tribal officials as well as key stakeholders in pollution prevention, recycling, energy conservation, and product stewardship from industry, trade associations, national environmental groups and academia. The Resource Conservation Challenge (RCC) Key Stakeholders Meeting, held June 20, was a central component of the agency's strategy to seek out creative conservation methods that go beyond current regulatory approaches.
In her opening remarks, EPA Deputy Administrator Linda Fisher said, "The Resource Conservation Challenge poses a challenge to all of us. For American businesses, it is to identify their major material input and waste streams and then look for creative ways to minimize them; for academic and research institutions, it is to come up with new ideas and technologies that help conserve resources; for America's communities, it is to design efficient workable systems for collecting reusable wastes."
Fisher also told attendees that the EPA is committing to meeting the challenge by coordinating "our resource conservation efforts across programs, across environmental media, and across different levels of government, so we support a national conservation ethic in a unified, effective way."