Urban Green Lab, in partnership with NRDC and Kroger, revealed a new mural on the Bandywood Drive side of the Kroger in Green Hills to celebrate the beauty of food and inspire shoppers to reduce food waste. Urban Green Lab is a local nonprofit that teaches communities to live sustainably.

Once the NPL Sustainability Committee formed in 2021, we were fortunate to connect with Urban Green Lab (UGL). Through a series of Zoom meetings with the Sustainability Committee, Jackie Goodwin, UGL’s Sustainable Workplaces Manager, oriented our team to the sustainability landscape in Nashville and led us through an assessment so we could see what areas we needed to focus on. In addition, NPL is in the process of joining UGL’s Nashville Sustainability Roundtable, which is “dedicated to guiding workplaces to be more sustainable.

Nashville is known for its constant construction and with that comes a lot of waste. Experts said it’s becoming a problem that is impacting everyone.

In many cases developers and builders are on a deadline. Their goal is to get done and get done as quickly as possible.

But the extra wood, metal and cardboard materials end up in dumpsters, which is impacting the environment which in turns impacts everyone.

“The environmental sector suffers from an alarming amount of whiteness,” says Patrick King, the sustainability education manager of local nonprofit Urban Green Lab. “There’s a perception that it’s a space only for affluent white folks, when in reality, when you look at the numbers, the overwhelming majority of people who believe in climate change and believe that things have to be done around climate change are Black and brown.”

Voting with our dollar and buying into eco-friendly companies may become even more important in Nashville, as many of our landfills are set to fill up and close in the next few years. Todd Lawrence, executive director of nonprofit Urban Green Lab, says the organization educates residents about Metro’s priorities, like the current Solid Waste Master Plan, which “will serve as a roadmap to achieving Zero Waste over the next 30 years,” according to Metro’s website.

Patrick King believes that sustainability is directly tied to issues of inequity. He’s the sustainability education manager with Urban Green Lab, and he’s working to implement a new Environmental Justice Initiative which will focus on helping distressed communities improve their health and lives.