Clean & Safe Environment

Puget Sound Sage and its allies are building a broad-based constituency for a sustainable, equitable, and clean energy economy in the metro Seattle region. We are dedicated to ensuring that our region’s growing green economy will create quality jobs, career opportunities for workers who need jobs the most and healthier and safer communities.  This is a triple bottom line for the planet and for regional equity.

Sage is approaching the new, green economy as an opportunity to simultaneously lift families out of poverty and provides a cleaner environment for all communities. On the one hand, low-income urban communities and people of color tend to suffer more from pollution, brownfields and unhealthy environments – including lack of access to nutritional food.  On the other hand, the same communities are typically left out of high-quality jobs in growth industries, like the “information economy” jobs over the last decade.  The emerging green economy and new focus on cleaner technologies offers solutions to disparities in both community health and employment.

Triple-bottom line outcomes can be achieved in many sectors that provide the foundation for a cleaner economy, including:
·    Energy efficiency retrofits of our region’s residential and commercial buildings
·    Expansion of recycling
·    Cleaning up pollution at major regional facilities such as the Port of Seattle
·    Investment in mass transit
·    New, green development
·    The local foods movement
·    Development of clean energy


Sage is currently working on two campaigns that will benefit the environment and low-income communities.  First, Sage is working to craft “pathways out of poverty” policies that incorporate quality jobs, career opportunities and expanded investment in energy efficiency retrofits at the State and local levels.  Second, Sage is working closely with the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, bringing together environmental justice advocates, community, and faith leaders to address port truck pollution in our neighborhoods while fighting sweatshop working conditions for port truckers.

Our community’s health and environment is an important frame that connects to every issue Sage works on. Everybody deserves to live in an environmentally safe and sustainable community, and everybody has a stake in larger environmental issues, including global warming. Adding equity to that frame creates a recipe for bringing prosperity to all communities and future generations.