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Grid Magazine Grid: Toward a Sustainable Philadelphia

As we put another 365 days and 12 issues of Grid behind us, we’d like to take the opportunity to express our gratitude f...
12/31/2025

As we put another 365 days and 12 issues of Grid behind us, we’d like to take the opportunity to express our gratitude for your endless support. Thank you for tuning in to local independent journalism and, most of all, thank you for advocating for sustainability and community right here in the city we call home — it’s because of you we’re able to continue sharing the stories that inform our effort to move toward a more sustainable Philadelphia.

From everyone at Grid, we wish you a very healthy and happy new year! We’ll see you in 2026 🌱

📝 Editor’s Notes: The IRL Issue 📝A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Comcast Technology Center. It was my first time in...
12/30/2025

📝 Editor’s Notes: The IRL Issue 📝

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Comcast Technology Center. It was my first time inside that gleaming skyscraper, designed to knock your socks off with escalators rising above “Exploding Paradigms,” a sculpture of mirrored triangles that the company describes as “a steel vortex heading into the sky.” Just past the top of the escalators, I stepped inside the 39-foot white Universal Sphere. It looks like a UFO, but it’s actually a 360-degree theater in which Peter Coyote narrates a montage of inspiring video clips with a theme of how much can be achieved by working together.

That sounds like a nice message, though I can’t help but be suspicious of a corporate messenger whose business model relies on people staying on their butts with their eyes glued to screens. I also take issue with the emphasis on achievement, which reduces togetherness to a means rather than an end in itself.

I’d rather focus on the togetherness.

➡️ Read the full note from our editor at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/living-sustainably-and-meaningfully/

✍️ Bernard Brown

🌿 On my way out of the Cobbs Creek Environmental Education Center in October, I stopped to pick through the leaves aroun...
12/29/2025

🌿 On my way out of the Cobbs Creek Environmental Education Center in October, I stopped to pick through the leaves around the American persimmon trees at the top of the driveway. It was a little early in the season, with plenty of fruit still on the tree, but I found a few little blobs of luscious orange goo to eat.

A ripe persimmon looks rotten by any other fruit’s standards, a ball of mush thinly contained by a weak skin. The force of hitting the ground usually breaks that skin, so that you could be fooled into thinking someone stepped on the fruit — and why would you want to eat something that looks rotten and stepped on?

Because it’s delicious, that’s why. And because if you eat it any earlier, it will be miserably astringent, its tannins coating the inside of your mouth with an unpleasant, scowl-inducing film. An early English colonist in Virginia wrote that the fruit are “not good until they be rotten.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/how-to-forage-wild-persimmons/

✍️ Bernard Brown
📸 Chris Baker Evens

12/28/2025

For the first time in Philadelphia Gas Works’ history, the utility has agreed to hold community engagement meetings to discuss decarbonization.

After PGW proposed a rate hike that would have raised an average monthly bill to over $104, a coalition of environmental justice groups intervened in their ratemaking case, arguing that customers shouldn’t have to pay more for energy that contributes to climate change, among other concerns. In a settlement approved on Oct. 9 by the Public Utility Commission, PGW agreed to a lowered rate hike that brings the average bill up to $98.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

12/27/2025

The U.S. Justice Department alleges that the School District of Philadelphia violated the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act, which requires schools to monitor their buildings for asbestos and to quickly remediate them. Instead of going to trial, they entered an agreement that placed the school district under judicial oversight as it inspects schools and removes or seals up remaining asbestos.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!FRIDAY, 12.26Seasonal Science at The Franklin Institute: Celebr...
12/26/2025

Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!

FRIDAY, 12.26
Seasonal Science at The Franklin Institute: Celebrate the season with science!

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/seasonal-science-at-the-franklin-institute/2025-12-26/

SATURDAY, 12.27
Family Explorers: Looking to spark your child’s curiosity about the outdoors? Join us for Family Explorers: What Lives at the Arboretum? This program invites families to explore nature using their senses to uncover its secrets.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/family-explorers-what-lives-at-the-arboretum-5/

SATURDAY, 12.27
Saturday Wildflower Walk: Join wildflower expert Dick Cloud on an informative two-hour hike that takes you through meadows, woods, and occasionally streamside.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/saturday-wildflower-walk-winter-edition-12/

☀️ For the Elmwood Park Zoo, conservation doesn’t just mean protecting wild animals, like the giraffes, jaguars and monk...
12/24/2025

☀️ For the Elmwood Park Zoo, conservation doesn’t just mean protecting wild animals, like the giraffes, jaguars and monkeys that live at the Norristown facility, but also the planet they inhabit.

“We are not just species survival-based, we are also environmental survival-based, so we want to make sure we’re taking care of the planet as best we can and in any way that we can,” says Eric Donovan, the zoo’s chief operating officer.

That commitment is built into the zoo’s new Welcome Center and Frank & Paige Engro Veterinary Health Center — a shared, solar-powered facility completed in summer 2024.

The building has 449 solar panels across two segmented roofs. The project was supported through PECO’s solar rebate programs, which provided the zoo with more than $40,000 in incentives for the project.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/elmwood-park-zoos-new-rooftop-solar-array/

✍️ Jenny Roberts
📸 Photo courtesy of Solar States

💧 On Saturday, Oct. 26, North Philly-based artist and children’s books author Alyssa Reynoso-Morris hosted a DIY water p...
12/23/2025

💧 On Saturday, Oct. 26, North Philly-based artist and children’s books author Alyssa Reynoso-Morris hosted a DIY water purification event at North Philly Peace Park. This was the final event of a three-part series called Stories Grow Here, funded by the Barnes Foundation.

The series is a part of Barnes North’s Everyday Places Artists Partnerships, which places a local artist in a community space that is related to the artist’s background and current work. Through reading and craft activities, Stories Grow Here combined art with an exploration of the natural world.

“People think that art can only happen inside of museums,” said Carolina Marin Hernandez, bilingual senior programs coordinator at the Barnes Foundation, who also leads Barnes North, a program designed to support and uplift local artists in North Philly. This new initiative is modeled after Barnes West, which had a similar mission.

Most of the participants were parents and children who volunteer at North Philly Peace Park, a community garden where autonomy and knowledge of the Earth is prioritized.

“I want [the kids] to be introduced to water because it’s from the earth,” said Illz Willz, parent volunteer and poet. “But also because we take water for granted.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/local-artist-teaches-garden-volunteers-how-water-gets-clean/

✍️ Deesarine Ballayan
📸 Jose Mazarriegos

For the first time in the utility’s history, Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) has agreed to hold community engagement meetin...
12/22/2025

For the first time in the utility’s history, Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) has agreed to hold community engagement meetings to discuss decarbonization.

In a settlement agreement approved Oct. 9 by the Public Utility Commission (PUC), PGW agreed not only to a significantly lower rate hike than they initially proposed, but also to begin engaging in a modernization process, starting with two community meetings to discuss long-term greenhouse gas emission reductions. But activists who intervened in the ratemaking case say that time will tell whether that commitment will have any teeth.

Peter Furcht of POWER Interfaith says this settlement is a good first step towards transitioning the city-owned utility away from gas, but in terms of holding them accountable to continue that effort, “There’s still a lot to be done.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/pgw-takes-a-step-towards-reducing-emissions/

✍️ Julia Lowe
📸 Photo by Jess Benjamin for Earthjustice

12/21/2025

Last year, the Solar for Schools act passed through the State Capitol, promising to provide $25 million dollars for schools across the commonwealth to install solar power arrays. This year, that legislation was renewed, but the demand from schools was more than triple what the program was equipped to pay out — and advocates say that funding is just a small silver lining in the dark clouds of state and federal solar policies.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

12/20/2025

In June 2026, Philadelphia’s current solid waste and recycling contracts are set to end. That contract expiration might mean a fundamental shift in the City’s waste management practices toward things like reuse, recycling, repair and composting,... or it could mean a continuation of the status quo: a recycling rate hovering around just 12%, and sending 40% of our waste to be burned at an incinerator down the river in Delaware County.

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier introduced the Stop Trashing Our Air Act in September, which would ban the City from incinerating any of its waste. The Committee on the Environment voted for Gauthier’s bill to pass out of committee at the November hearing, and as of this recording, it awaits a vote by the full City Council.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

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