Office of Sustainable Development
waste not, want not.
November 19th, 2008
Butch Miller | Un-fare play.9 comments
November 12th, 2008
Rainbow Adult Living | Busted!28 comments
November 5th, 2008
Steve Blake and Ike Diogu | Two Blazers blow a layup.21 comments
October 29th, 2008
Oregon Public Utility Commission | A little transparency, please.2 comments
October 22nd, 2008
TriMet | Clean up this eyesore.11 comments
October 8th, 2008
Cynthia Harris | There’s wrong. Then there’s Army wrong.13 comments
October 1st, 2008
You Can’t Spell “Obsession” Without The O. | A new way to spark reader interest: Distribute a DVD that PO’s subscribers.15 comments
September 24th, 2008
Multnomah County Assessment & Taxation | Squeezing blood from a cucumber.13 comments
September 17th, 2008
David Powell7 comments
September 10th, 2008
John Nelsen | Truth in advertising?7 comments
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[November 28th, 2007] At a time of year when consumption and waste shift into overdrive, the Rogue Desk was thrilled to get the recent City of Portland’s Sustainable Use Policy 2007 Annual Report.
The eight-page document, released Nov. 14, included plenty of excellent trivia. Who would have guessed that city employees used 76.8 million sheets of paper in the past year (up a couple of million since City Council passed the 2003 Sustainable Paper Use Policy, and far from the goal of reducing usage 15 percent by 2008)? Or that the parks bureau topped all users, with 23.2 million sheets?
The report also included this tantalizing morsel of hypocrisy: The bureau whose per-capita paper usage has risen the most overall since bean-counters began tracking this in 2003-2004? None other than this week’s Rogue, the Office of Sustainable Development , whose 40 employees’ stated function is to provide “policy and programs that integrate efforts related to energy efficiency, renewable resources, waste reduction and recycling.”
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Of the 20 bureaus that have reported per-capita usage each year, only five have shown an increase. But the percentage increases in all the other four put together don’t equal the profligate paper pushers in OSD, whose per-capita usage soared 155 percent over the three-year period. (Overall usage rose 245 percent.)
That’s pathetically unsustainable behavior compared with the average city employee, whose paper consumption, even with OSD included, declined a respectably green 4 percent over the same time frame.
Michele Crim, who tracks paper usage for OSD, says the baseline year of 2003-04 had an artificially low figure and that “we’ve cut copier-paper use back 40 percent.”
Oh, and our copy of the paper usage report? We recycled it.
RECENT COMMENTS ON “Office of Sustainable Development”
How much has the OSD grown (employee #'s and type of work done) since the 2003-04 figure was calculated?
Another case of a public office doing what is does best,..waste taxpayers dollars and mission failure. Is Dick Cheney head of the OSD ? hg
How much more paper is being used in those now-public rest rooms in City Hall?
An interesting dilemma ... getting the word out about sustainability without using a ton of paper. Just goes to show that changing behavior, via cultural stance, is key. I say eliminate paper from t...









