Buffalo 3rd cleanest city in the US

[BlaCkROcKDan]

From this months Readers Digest

#3 Buffalo, New York
(Erie and Niagara counties)

Background: Long known as a Rust Belt city where steel was king, Buffalo was hit hard when that industry went into steep decline more than two decades ago. As steel plants shut down, Buffalo was forced to rebuild its economy from the ground up. But by leveraging its assets, including a low cost of living and cheap, clean hydroelectric energy generated by nearby Niagara Falls, Buffalo has begun luring new, nonmanufacturing businesses to the area.

Problems: After the shuttering of its steel plants and oil refineries, the region was left with the residue of its industrial past: A heavily polluted Buffalo River and acres of brownfields and Superfund sites, including the notorious Love Canal. By the 1990s, Buffalo's dwindling population, shrinking tax base and fiscal problems meant drastic cuts in city services -- including sanitation. As a result, huge trash piles often accumulated in front of homes, sometimes going uncollected for days on end. At the same time, Buffalo was struggling with a sizable rat infestation.

Solutions: With the help of environmental quality bonds and Superfund dollars, Buffalo has made great strides in containing and cleaning up brownfields and contaminated sites. Meanwhile, plans are underway to turn part of the former Bethlehem Steel site -- an 1,100-acre brownfield on the shores of Lake Erie -- into a wind farm that will generate clean power for businesses and residents. The state is also overseeing a Buffalo River cleanup, already successful enough to draw boaters and fishermen back to the waterway. As for the trash problems, Buffalo undertook an award-winning restructuring of its garbage collection system. A fleet of 13 high-tech street sweepers, deployed 24 hours a day during non-winter months, now helps keep the streets clear of debris. And the city has dramatically curbed the rat problem by distributing large, securely covered garbage bins to every residence in the city.

[CSense]

From this months Readers Digest

#3 Buffalo, New York
(Erie and Niagara counties)

But by leveraging its assets, including a low cost of living and cheap, clean hydroelectric energy generated by nearby Niagara Falls, Buffalo has begun luring new, nonmanufacturing businesses to the area.[/

Whaaaaaat? Who? Where? How? HUH?

[winfield31]

From this months Readers Digest

#3 Buffalo, New York
(Erie and Niagara counties)

Background: Long known as a Rust Belt city where steel was king, Buffalo was hit hard when that industry went into steep decline more than two decades ago. As steel plants shut down, Buffalo was forced to rebuild its economy from the ground up. But by leveraging its assets, including a low cost of living and cheap, clean hydroelectric energy generated by nearby Niagara Falls, Buffalo has begun luring new, nonmanufacturing businesses to the area.

Problems: After the shuttering of its steel plants and oil refineries, the region was left with the residue of its industrial past: A heavily polluted Buffalo River and acres of brownfields and Superfund sites, including the notorious Love Canal. By the 1990s, Buffalo's dwindling population, shrinking tax base and fiscal problems meant drastic cuts in city services -- including sanitation. As a result, huge trash piles often accumulated in front of homes, sometimes going uncollected for days on end. At the same time, Buffalo was struggling with a sizable rat infestation.

Solutions: With the help of environmental quality bonds and Superfund dollars, Buffalo has made great strides in containing and cleaning up brownfields and contaminated sites. Meanwhile, plans are underway to turn part of the former Bethlehem Steel site -- an 1,100-acre brownfield on the shores of Lake Erie -- into a wind farm that will generate clean power for businesses and residents. The state is also overseeing a Buffalo River cleanup, already successful enough to draw boaters and fishermen back to the waterway. As for the trash problems, Buffalo undertook an award-winning restructuring of its garbage collection system. A fleet of 13 high-tech street sweepers, deployed 24 hours a day during non-winter months, now helps keep the streets clear of debris. And the city has dramatically curbed the rat problem by distributing large, securely covered garbage bins to every residence in the city.

3rd cleanest , I'd hate to see cities number 1 , 2 & 4 or number 10 or 100 for that matter if we're number 3 ?

[citymouse]

From this months Readers Digest

. By the 1990s, Buffalo's dwindling population, shrinking tax base and fiscal problems meant drastic cuts in city services -- including sanitation. As a result, huge trash piles often accumulated in front of homes, sometimes going uncollected for days on end. At the same time, Buffalo was struggling with a sizable rat infestation.

Solutions: As for the trash problems, Buffalo undertook an award-winning restructuring of its garbage collection system. A fleet of 13 high-tech street sweepers, deployed 24 hours a day during non-winter months, now helps keep the streets clear of debris. And the city has dramatically curbed the rat problem by distributing large, securely covered garbage bins to every residence in the city.

Kudos to the Buffalo Street sanitation guys. Hardest working public service workers in WNY. It's just to bad nobody takes the time to recognize what these guys really do, and how well they do it.
Send a copy of this to the Brown administration and remind him that these guys haven't had a raise since July 1st of 2001. That's seven years to you and me.

[leftWNYbecauseofBS]

Kudos to the Buffalo Street sanitation guys. Hardest working public service workers in WNY. It's just to bad nobody takes the time to recognize what these guys really do, and how well they do it.
Send a copy of this to the Brown administration and remind him that these guys haven't had a raise since July 1st of 2001. That's seven years to you and me.

Ummm...

The change came from 13 high-tech street sweepers and plastic secure bins.

[Surfing USA]

Kudos to the Buffalo Street sanitation guys. Hardest working public service workers in WNY. It's just to bad nobody takes the time to recognize what these guys really do, and how well they do it.
Send a copy of this to the Brown administration and remind him that these guys haven't had a raise since July 1st of 2001. That's seven years to you and me.

No disrespect intended towards your profession, (I most certainly wouldn't want to do your job,) but you ARE KIDDING about the "hardest working;" right?

Every time I've seen Buffalo sanitation workers at work, all they do is wheel totes to a pneumatic arm which empties the tote into the truck.

Maybe I'm missing something?

PS: How you guys deal with the stink day-in and day-out, (especially on hot, muggy days,) is beyond me.

[kma516]

Hey Surfing, cute siggie ...

Your feet are supposed to stink, that's why God put them so far away from your nose.

That's also why He put our butts BEHIND us.

[cantolina]

Gee, that's just great....

Someone send a thank you note to the EPA....

Now we have clean air, clean water, and no jobs worth having....

[gorja]

Not to rain on anyone's parade but cleanliness must be in the eye of the beholder.

Forbe's article on America's Cleanest Cities from March 2008 states Buffalo is near the bottom of the list.

Best Places
America's Cleanest Cities
Tom Van Riper, 03.17.08, 5:00 PM ET

Want to live where the air is sweet, the water is pure and the streets are clean? Try the country. But what if you don't like the sticks? Then try Florida.
Led by Miami, the Sunshine State dominates our 2008 list of America's Cleanest Cities with four metro areas in the top 10--Jacksonville (No. 3), Orlando (No. 4) and Tampa-St. Petersburg (No. 8) all make appearances. Clearly, a state that relies so heavily on tourism and part-time snow-bird residents knows the value of keeping itself spruced up for company.
With the built-in advantage of weather patterns that blow out smog, these large metropolitan areas, together with No. 2-ranked Seattle and No. 5 Portland, Ore., top our 2008 list. But it's more than just sea breezes pushing these metros up the list. These big cities are also reaping the rewards of investing in efforts to keep clean, even as their populations boom.
In Pictures: America's 10 Cleanest Cities

In recent years, Florida's Department of Environmental Protection has launched programs aimed at providing power plants with the equipment needed to scrub out harmful emissions before they're discharged. The agency has singled out the Tampa Electric Co. for going beyond federal and state requirements on emission reductions.
On the water side, the agency has aimed its budget not only on fighting direct discharges into public waters but on indirect spillage from things like storm drain runoff.
The same is true elsewhere. Portland, for example, is 10 years into a 14-year, $2 billion investment aimed at cleaning up the Willamette River. In addition, the city's added more light rail, sidewalks and biofuels to its bus fleet. It's gone a long way toward reducing air pollution in the region.
"The investments we've made on land use and transportation over the past two decades are paying off," says Portland city council commissioner Dan Saltzman.
Air quality is a huge health factor for urban dwellers, so we made it a very big deal in our study. To determine the cleanest major cities in the U.S., we initially measured the rankings for air pollution and ozone levels among all 49 U.S. metro areas with populations exceeding 1 million, using data from the American Lung Association. After eliminating those areas that ranked poorest in air quality, we measured the remaining 29 cities on the additional but less-weighted factors of water quality and per-capita spending on Superfund site cleanup and solid-waste management. From this list, we drew our top 10.
All figures were based on Metropolitan Statistical Areas (which include the city and surrounding area) with the exception of waste-management spending, which was based exclusively on the city proper.
Water cleanliness rankings were derived from statistics compiled by the University of Cincinnati from local reports of EPA violations. Metros were ranked based on reports of bacteria, chlorine byproducts and chemicals or metals such as arsenic, copper and lead in the drinking water. Operational expenditures for solid-waste management are recorded at city-data.com.
Beyond health, cleanliness appears to have an important economic impact.

While nine of our 10 cleanest cities showed population increases between 2000 and 2006, major metro areas losing residents over that period tend to rank near the bottom of the cleanliness list; they include Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, N.Y., and Detroit. Many factors, notably economic ones, go into a person's choice to move, of course. But a reputation for clean air, water and streets seems to count as well.

The migration has been most pronounced in the Sunbelt, with Jacksonville growing its population 8% and Miami 11.5% since the start of the decade. Can they keep clean with all this growth? That's the challenge of the coming decades. Here's hoping they can.

[cantolina]

"we initially measured the rankings for air pollution and ozone levels among all 49 U.S. metro areas with populations exceeding 1 million, using data from the American Lung Association. After eliminating those areas that ranked poorest in air quality, we measured the remaining 29 cities on the additional but less-weighted factors of water quality and per-capita spending on Superfund site cleanup and solid-waste management. From this list, we drew our top 10."

Did we even QUALIFY for this study? I don't have the numbers myself, but this post SEEMS to qualify as a "red herring"....

[Save Us]

Do the sanitation guys still get paid 8 hours for 5 hours of work??
Maybe I imagined that ?

Buffalo is one of the cleanest because there's less people polluting and dirtying.

It would also be cleaner if we had an army of bulldozers.

[gorja]

Originally posted by cantolina:
Did we even QUALIFY for this study? I don't have the numbers myself, but this post SEEMS to qualify as a "red herring"....

It depends what they considered to be Buffalo metro. If they considered Erie & Niagara County as Buffalo metro as the Reader's Digest article did then the population (1,170,111) would qualify.

[citymouse]

Ummm...

The change came from 13 high-tech street sweepers and plastic secure bins.

I don't know what they mean by that. We use the same street sweepers we've used since I have been there.

[citymouse]

Do the sanitation guys still get paid 8 hours for 5 hours of work??
Maybe I imagined that ?

Buffalo is one of the cleanest because there's less people polluting and dirtying.

It would also be cleaner if we had an army of bulldozers.

Sanitation crews work an incentive shift. They take no lunch or contractual breaks. They are allowed to stop in the middle of the run for a bathroom break and a water or coffee. But the crew is done and the truck back at the garage by one p.m. They start at six thirty and generaly work a six and one half hour day. They don't just empty totes they also have to take two allowable pieces of trash next to the totes. Most of the time they will take the extra bags taht most people put out as well.
If you think pulling those totes is so easy, it's not.
They do it when it's cold and raining. Thundering and lighting dosen't deter them either. Zero degree weather adds to the misery. As does dragging five hundred totes a day over snow banks day in and day out. It's no picnic when it's eighty five or nintey and humid. Plus the smell, plus the rats and roaches.
Everybody thinks these guys got it made at twenty nine thousand a year. Try to find one that dosen't have a bad back.
Nobody works harder in the city than those guys.

[leftWNYbecauseofBS]

I don't know what they mean by that. We use the same street sweepers we've used since I have been there.

So then it looks as if the report did not do a lot of research. Well then, how accurate is the report?

Maybe it was Buffalo, MN?