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Greener Practices for Business, Site Development and Site Cleanups: A Toolkit

More and more businesses, communities and developers are realizing direct and indirect benefits from embracing greener practices. A business may reduce its regulatory burden and operating costs by decreasing its environmental emissions or discharges through reduced quantity or toxicity of inputs and wastes. Communities may watch property values increase and quality of life improve with enhanced or restored greenspace and thoughtfully designed public buildings. Developers may realize higher rents and municipalities may realize lower overhead due to decreased costs in operating and maintaining a green or high-performance site and building. We hope you will be able to use this Internet site as an information reference as well as a tool for making decisions.

Help maintain a healthy environment or improve environmental outcomes while doing business, developing a site or cleaning up contamination:

• Visit the Showcase of Ideas to view a photo gallery of options.
  
  
• Use the Decision Tree contained in this Toolkit to help identify options appropriate to your site. The options target preventive or other practices that are oriented towards sustainability.
  
  
• Glance at the List of Options to get a quick idea of the 15 options promoted in this Toolkit.
  
  
• From the Decision Tree or the List of Options, you'll find links to Option Detail Sheets, which provide lots of information about the 15 options, including contacts for regulation, business and technical assistance.
  
  
• Links to Case Studies and a Resource Referral are available from the Option Detail Sheets, the Decision Tree, List of Options or the Main Page.

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) published this Internet site with help from stakeholders to expand the use of greener practices in Minnesota. We were inspired to create the Web page by the work of the innovative regulatory customers and staff already using greener approaches at contaminated sites and elsewhere. We wanted to document this work as a means of promoting greener practices among other interested folks.

Please use the contact information below to provide us with any suggestions for improvements, to alert us to out-of-date information and to get your questions about the Toolkit answered.

Learn More About...

• Preventive and other practices that are oriented towards sustainability.
  
  
• Promoting greener practices.
  
  
• Voluntary implementation of greener practices.
  
  
• Success stories and lessons learned.
  
  
• Awards and recognition.
  
  
• Development of this initiative.

Go to Learn More About this Initiative

Cynthia Hilmoe
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
Policy and Planning Division
520 N. Lafayette Rd.
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-296-7783
651-297-8676 FAX
cynthia.hilmoe@pca.state.mn.us