Sustainability and Technology Connect

The dominant feature of Atlanta's landscape is not man-made infrastructure, but rather a sprawling, robust tree canopy covering approximately half of Metro Atlanta. Hundreds of thousands of trees are located throughout the city in yards, parks, nature reserves, public spaces, and along the streets. Tree cover is so fundamental to the cityscape that Atlanta has earned the nickname ‘the city in the forest’. 

Many Atlanta-based organizations and nonprofits are dedicated to preserving the city's urban forest, particularly as threats of climate change reveal just how essential trees are to our environment. Businesses and utilities have also stated their increased commitment to environmental stewardship, and when partnerships between these different groups are formed, it creates an opportunity to develop creative, sustainable, and efficient solutions.

Electric utility companies are important stakeholders when it comes to tree care and maintenance. These companies are responsible for vegetation growing in the “rights-of-way”, or areas with utility infrastructure, and employ a variety of methods to control or remove any undesired growth in those areas. This process, also known as vegetation management, is done on a regular basis to prevent interruptions in service and to ensure safety. For electric utility companies, vegetation management consists mainly of tree-trimming and pruning, which reduces the risk of electrical shortages and other safety hazards caused by overgrowth or falling branches. 

Electric utilities have become good stewards of the trees they maintain. While utility vegetation management may at first seem at odds with environmental stewardship, utilities have found ways to improve their practices through integrated vegetation management (IVM) and are finding new ways to promote sustainability through collaboration with non-profits and other community organizations.

For example, electric utility companies have long promoted "Right Tree, Right Place" to encourage planting low growing species below and around overhead power lines. Some innovative utilities are seeking to reduce the long-term cost of vegetation management by removing “incompatible species” near their lines at the same time offering landowners a replacement tree that is better suited for the space. Targeted removals, whether due to incompatibility or tree health concerns, creates an opportunity to collaborate with organizations whose missions aim to preserve and expand tree tree canopy. By connecting utilities with tree planting organizations, this positive approach to vegetation management can connect stakeholders with seemingly conflicting interests and can actually complement one another with better solutions. 

“Clearion facilitates collaboration between managers, field personnel, data analysts, company executives, and other private or public stakeholders for an integrated and sustainable solution."

Clearion is an Atlanta-based company that helps utility companies manage their vegetation management projects. Clearion is also a partner of Trees Atlanta, a non-profit organization dedicated to planting and preserving the city’s tree canopy. The partnership began when a long-time Clearion customer, who sits on the board at Trees Atlanta, introduced the two organizations. While these organizations seem so different at the surface (helping utility companies clear rights-of-way versus planting trees), they are alike in their responsibility for and stewardship of trees, and this is where they have been able to collaborate. Trees Atlanta implemented the Clearion solution to manage vegetation management projects and display data. With Trees Atlanta on the same platform as many utility companies, the opportunity exists for real-time digital collaboration around replanting and restoration efforts.

Scroll through the Trees Atlanta Story Map or read the Clearion blog below to learn more about how the two organizations have collaborated to produce better solutions for their respective communities.

Finding opportunities for collaboration between infrastructure managers and sustainability organizations is one of the missions promoted at Clearion. And it was with this mission in mind that Clearion helped develop a sustainable solution to another vegetation management challenge: waste disposal. Tree-trimming operations create byproducts in the form of wood chips, and maintenance crews are constantly having to find locations to dispose of them. In urban areas like Atlanta, these locations are usually in the suburbs, and the process of transporting the wood chips costs time, money, and fuel.

The solution began to take shape the day Clearion CEO, Chris Kelly, volunteered at a local school. Volunteers worked on the school’s farm, planting vegetables, building garden beds, and spreading wood chips for mulch. Drawing the connection between the farm’s demand for wood chips and the power company’s challenge of disposing of them, Chris and the Clearion team set out to identify other sites in Atlanta that had a need for wood chips. After discovering several other locations, Clearion used GIS to connect the utility line clearing crews with the organizations in need of wood chips. Tree-trimming crews now can view the map while on a job to see each site’s location, status (Needs Chips versus Does Not Need Chips), and client information, expediting the delivery process.

News of the wood chip program has spread through word of mouth since it launched, allowing it to grow organically within the community. As a result, new sites are continually being added to the map, shown below.

The redistribution of resources within a community is a fundamental concept in sustainability. Through this closed-loop recycling program, power companies have the opportunity to reduce their waste output while simultaneously supporting local organizations, and the benefits continue to grow from there.

The Atlanta region has several food deserts, typically defined as low-income communities located over a mile from the nearest reliable source of fresh produce or other healthy foods. The importance of food sovereignty has been emphasized by a growing environmental justice movement, and there are many organizations working to combat food injustice and support the residents of food-insecure communities.

Currently, the program sends wood chips to three in-town farms in Atlanta: The Paideia School Farm, the Thomasville Heights Elementary School Farm, and the Women’s Transitional Center Food Garden. These farms are part of a network of urban agriculture programs and farmers in Atlanta known as the Grassroots Growers Alliance (GGA). Established in 2019, the GGA advocates for a community-based and collaborative approach to address food insecurity (the unequal distribution of healthy food) and build local food systems to ensure that all people have access to fresh produce.

These farms exemplify just a few of the myriad ways in which urban agriculture programs can benefit or enrich a community. With support from students, families, and volunteers, the Grassroots Growers Alliance and its three partner farms produce enough food to feed more than 130 families on a bi-weekly basis.

The Paideia School Farm and Urban Agriculture Program started out in 2011, using the farm as an educational platform to support curriculum and promote education through agricultural experiences. Miranda Knowles, who teaches in the science department at the Paideia School, has worked with the farm for years. Her students get hands-on experience vaccinating chickens, planting herbs and perennial plants, and maintaining the farm, and they are then able to relate these real-life examples to their studies, with topics such as biology, anatomy, immunology, and, most recently, medical botany.

Through the lens of food and farming, this program also highlights the importance of growing food for the community and the benefits of having healthy, sustainable food for everyone. This year, when the coronavirus outbreak left millions of people struggling to make ends meet, the importance of community and food justice became even more apparent. At Paideia, some of the students' families were especially hard-hit, but thanks to the strong community and continued support for the urban agriculture program, those families have been able to receive food every week from Paideia and its partner farms.

"You can learn biology terms in your book, or you can be like, ‘Wow, here’s how biology is helping people.’ And I prefer that.”

–Miranda Knowles, science teacher at the Paideia School

The Thomasville Heights Elementary School Farm is another partner farm of the GGA, and consists of 2,000 square feet of vegetable beds and food forest on an old sports field. Since June of 2018, students have grown and harvested hundreds of pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables to be distributed, not sold, to people within the community who would otherwise lack access to reliable sources of healthy food. The farm also provides an educational platform that strengthens the curriculum with hands-on learning that allows students to thrive. Students develop important skills while learning to value their connection to their food, the natural world, and the community in which they live.

The GGA's most recent endeavor is the Food Garden and Training Program at the Metro Atlanta Women's Transitional Center. This farm and agricultural training program began in 2019 to assist women who are transitioning out of the prison system. Program participants attend monthly workshops (assisted by Paideia High School students) that focus on agricultural skills training, horticultural therapy, and health and wellness. This program aims to foster meaningful relationships between communities while participants learn skills to grow and run an urban farm, which are useful agricultural job skills that increase the likelihood of successful transitions out of the prison system. The GGA helps these women become part of something transformational, allowing them to transcend the walls of the prison system as they work to build out a more equitable food system for everyone.

The Olmsted Linear Park, located in Druid Hills, is another beneficiary of the wood chip program. The six-segment park is named after one of its developers, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., an American landscape architect who is most famous for conceptualizing and designing Central Park in New York City. 

Olmsted also played a large role in the American conservation movement, and was a strong advocate for the country’s beautiful natural spaces, including the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove, during the late 19th century. He believed that connection to wilderness was vital to human well-being, and found ways to bring the restorative power of green spaces to urban areas through the purposeful designs of his parks.

Combining thoughtful design with a deep respect for the environment, Olmsted strived to do as little harm to the native landscape as possible in his projects. To uphold this legacy, the Olmsted Linear Park Alliance (OLPA) was created in 1997 as part of a coalition to restore and preserve the park as closely to Olmsted's original plan as possible.

“Olmsted understood the challenge of making a city sustainable required all kinds of innovations — it was a social, economic and political problem as well as an environmental problem.”

–Adam Rome, Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo

The Olmsted Linear Park Alliance undertook all fundraising, rehabilitation, and maintenance activities necessary to restore all six segments of the Linear Park. In the process, OLPA added pathways for recreation, installed about 2,600 new trees and shrubs, and raised enough money to bury all of the utility lines in the area — approximately 11 miles of conduit and cable — so that trees can grow freely. Because OLPA is responsible for the maintenance of all trees located within the park, they require a significant amount of wood chips for their tree care and landscaping regimen. Now that the park has been looped into Clearion's system, those wood chips are supplied by a local source and available on demand.

Safe, reliable electricity is vitally important to our economy and our society. The same is true for the rest of our critical infrastructure, including other utilities and transportation networks. Geo-spatial work management systems create opportunities to extend the benefits of software beyond these essential maintenance operations and create positive outcomes in ways that weren't achievable in a manual, paper world. Clearion is committed to finding and enabling these creative solutions, and we'd love to connect with you to explore your innovative ideas.

• Are you a utility or infrastructure organization interested in collaborating with local community groups and non-profits? Let's start a conversation.
• Do you want to learn more about the Atlanta wood chip program or get on the list of delivery sites? Clearion can connect you.

Email us at info@clearion.com or go to clearion.com/contact