Grid Magazine

Grid Magazine Grid: Toward a Sustainable Philadelphia

🥟 Even the most talented chefs began their food careers as eaters. Well before they were able to cook, they witnessed th...
12/09/2025

🥟 Even the most talented chefs began their food careers as eaters. Well before they were able to cook, they witnessed the magic of combining ingredients into delicious dishes, made for them by family, friends and other cooks. For some, need, desire — or even nostalgia — converts us from eaters to makers of the foods we love.

Sharon Lee’s childhood memories are about eating dumplings, not making them. Growing up in southern Taiwan, she and her family frequented a day market where they purchased fresh, uncooked dumplings. Lee remembers the dazzling speed and dexterity of the woman who filled and wrapped the savory treats. The family took their dumplings home to savor, enhanced with the simplest of soy-based sauces and a splash of vinegar.

In February 2021, as the pandemic isolation was receding and the Chinese New Year was approaching, a friend suggested that Lee might host a dumpling party. “Typically Chinese New Year doesn’t easily fit into the American holiday calendar,” Lee says, “but I still like to celebrate it. Inviting friends over to make dumplings seemed like a low-pressure, fun way to bring a small group together.” That first casual dumpling dinner party launched a tradition that Lee, a radiology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has continued to celebrate every February since.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/dumpling-party-brings-friends-together/

✍️ Marilyn Anthony
📸 Photo courtesy of Sharon Lee

🌳 On an afternoon in late October, students from Sayre High School were trickling into the Cobbs Creek Community Environ...
12/08/2025

🌳 On an afternoon in late October, students from Sayre High School were trickling into the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Center’s community room to take off their waders and to review what they had found in the creek. It was a scene you might expect at any environmental center, but a relatively fresh one now that the Cobbs Creek center is open again after a two-year, $1.5 million renovation.

The building, originally a horse stable used by the Fairmount Park Guard (a park police force absorbed into the Philadelphia Police Department in 1972), opened as an environmental center in 2001 thanks to a campaign helmed by retired teacher and school administrator Carole Williams-Green. The resulting nonprofit organization, the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center (I served on the organization’s board of trustees from 2009 to 2011), ran the center until 2017 when Philadelphia Parks & Recreation took over operations. At that point, Cobbs Creek native Alicia R. Burbage, who had been involved with the center and the efforts to create it since the 1990s, started as director of operations, community outreach and civic engagement.

Although Parks & Recreation did not officially announce the center’s opening, they hosted a performing arts camp in June, according to Burbage. Parks & Recreation brought on environmental educators Andrew White and Nick Tonetti in June as well, and they got to work cleaning up the center’s orchard and launching programming such as weekly plant walks in the park.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/cobbs-creek-environmental-center-reopens/

✍️ Bernard Brown
📸 Chris Baker Evens

☀️ A year ago, advocates of solar energy across Pennsylvania were flying high. Democratic state Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, ...
12/04/2025

☀️ A year ago, advocates of solar energy across Pennsylvania were flying high. Democratic state Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, whose South Philly district stretches from Pat’s King of Steaks to Lincoln Financial Field, had just pulled off a political Hail Mary: successfully shepherding a clean energy bill through the gridlocked State Capitol. Titled Solar for Schools, the legislation promised to provide $25 million dollars for schools to install solar arrays across the commonwealth.

A year later, the sentiment is decidedly mixed. In a state budget bill approved by lawmakers in November — after an impasse that spanned more than four months — Solar for Schools was renewed for another $25 million. That appears to be a vote of confidence by lawmakers after a successful first year. Environmental nonprofit PennEnvironment calculates that the program received 88 applications to install solar at schools, totaling $88 million in requested funds, more than three times what it was equipped to pay out. Ultimately, 73 applicants across 24 counties received about $23 million, including about $2.3 million for projects at seven schools in Philadelphia, with additional projects in the suburbs.

“I’m proud of the first year,” Fiedler, who chairs the state House Energy Committee, said in a late October interview. “The ability of a school to generate their own electricity, to provide them with that energy, freedom and independence, and also that return on investment, is really exciting for me as a parent and lawmaker.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/will-feds-block-solar-on-philly-schools/

✍️ Kyle Bagenstose
📸 Photo courtesy of The Office of Rep. Fiedler

🚮 In June 2026, Philadelphia’s current solid waste and recycling contracts are set to end, and a coalition of policymake...
12/02/2025

🚮 In June 2026, Philadelphia’s current solid waste and recycling contracts are set to end, and a coalition of policymakers, industry professionals and advocates hope to use the contract expiration as a lever to fundamentally shift the City’s waste management practices toward circular approaches that include reuse, recycling, repair and composting — while addressing environmental justice issues.

Critics say that the City of Philadelphia has prioritized disposal over alternative waste management strategies such as reuse, recycling and composting for decades. As the City’s first recycling coordinator, Maurice Sampson, likes to say, “The motto of the Sanitation Department is ‘throw trash and look good.’”

Since the pandemic, Philly’s recycling rate has hovered around 12%, refusing to budge even with Mayor Parker’s establishment of an Office of Clean and Green, which purports to exist to tackle the city’s pervasive litter issue and catapult Philly to the “safest, cleanest and greenest big city in the nation.” Advocates like Shari Hersh of Trash Academy question how Philadelphia can be the greenest big city while diverting 12% of its waste and sending 40% to be burned at an incinerator just down the river in Chester, Delaware County.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/a-bill-could-force-philly-to-stop-burning-trash-and-recycle-more/

✍️ Samantha Wittchen
📸 Photo courtesy of Durrell Hospedale/Philadelphia City Council Flickr

Happy December! It’s time to round out the year — our brand new Education Issue is here 📚About the Issue••••••••••••••••...
12/01/2025

Happy December! It’s time to round out the year — our brand new Education Issue is here 📚

About the Issue
••••••••••••••••
In 2022, the Pennsylvania State Board of Education adopted new environmental literacy and sustainability standards. This is surely important — that all students in Pennsylvania learn about how to protect the environment and live sustainably — but how do we get them to take that education to heart?

All the nature lovers out there know there is more to understanding the world than naming its parts and knowing how they all work together. There is the smell and feel of it all too, plus the sights and sounds that lift the topics off the page or screen and into the real world. There is the sense of wonder at it all, and that wonder can be a powerful motivator to learn and understand.

In this issue, we take a look at an environmental center devoted to building more than just knowledge. We also talk to a teacher about how to connect kids to the natural world, even when they’ve only got the ordinary urban landscape to work with.

We also explore schools themselves as sites of environmental action, both as polluted spaces in need of remediation and as hubs for action to generate renewable energy.

We hope you come away from this issue ready to help learners of all ages connect with their world, and to make sure their world takes care of them.

➡️ Read the full Education Issue now at gridphilly.com!

📸 Cover photo by Chris Baker Evens

11/30/2025

In just a single day in October, 17 birds were killed or stunned by buildings in Center City. Even though that’s a large number, it’s a sharp decline from the same day five years ago, when more than 400 dead birds were found in Center City. It’s a difference that reflects the efforts of Bird Safe Philly over the last five years to prevent migratory bird deaths in the city.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

11/29/2025

In September 2024, Philadelphians saw their monthly water bills jump by about 12%, the second largest rate hike that year of any large water system in the country. This year, rates went up by nearly another 10%, now pushing a typical monthly bill close to $100.

According to Robert Ballenger, an attorney who serves as public advocate before the city’s independent Water Rate Board, we may not have seen anything yet.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

☕ As the holiday season approaches, college campus cafés are preparing for the influx of students ordering coffee and pa...
11/27/2025

☕ As the holiday season approaches, college campus cafés are preparing for the influx of students ordering coffee and pastries to power them through final exams. But once the semester officially ends, what happens to the product that isn’t sold?

That’s what Saxbys cafés across nine states tackled last academic year as they participated in the Inventory Wind-Down Challenge, the second iteration of the Food Saver Challenge held by the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN).

The first challenge, won by Crust Bakery, was a competition between various food businesses in Philadelphia. Caterers, grocery stores, bakeries and cafés competed to reduce their organic waste or divert it from landfills through strategies like composting, donating and even creating new recipes using food scraps.

For the second challenge, things worked differently: Instead of having different businesses compete, SBN partnered with Saxbys, and the coffee chain had its café locations compete against each other to earn the most points for waste reduction practices. That friendly competition was a great fit for Saxbys, says Rebecca Nichols Franqui, program and membership manager at SBN, since it operates on an experiential learning model, in which most cafés are located on college campuses and are run fully by students.

“They got really invested. They cared deeply and really had fun with it,” says Nichols Franqui. “Lots of them really did embrace the topic and the cause in general of preventing food waste.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/11/01/saxbys-coffee-reduces-food-and-coffee-waste-on-college-campuses-during-food-saver-challenge/

✍️ Julia Lowe
📸 Photo courtesy of Saxbys

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