WBBM reporter Terry Keshner recently visited Plant Chicago to speak with Executive Director, Jonathan Pereira, and Food Access Manager, Denise Covarrubias. We spent a lot of time talking about our work to cultivate local circular economies, including increasing access to locally and sustainably grown food, free composting opportunities, workshops, intercambio (swapping) events, and repurposing/decarbonizing buildings. It was way too much to fit into a single radio segment, but Terry managed to cover most of it and still get in a mini interview with our chickens!
You can listen to the entire WBBM segment here: https://www.audacy.com/wbbm780/news/local/plant-chicago-cultivating-local-sustainable-food-on-sw-side
AND THERE IS MORE...
WBBM ran another spot that highlighted the fact that there is still a lot of work to do to transition to alternatives to fossil fuels in vehicles.
It has been close to two years since Plant Chicago installed the first publicly available EV charging station on the Southwest side of Chicago. Today, there is still a notable lack of EV chargers available for the public to use. Plant Chicago's charger is still the only one available in our neighborhood!
As mentioned in previous posts, the transition to electric vehicles must insure that there is equitable access to chargers. The majority of EV chargers in the Chicago area are still located in private homes and only accesible to the owner. In neighborhoods like Back of Yards, the majority of residents live in multifamily buildings, do not have have access to off street parking, and if they are renters they do not have the ability to decide whether a charger could be installed. So even if somebody has the financial resources to install an EV charging station at their home there are still obstacles.
This means that is incumbent on those residents and businesses that can install EV chargers to install chargers that are publicly available. There are apps that can be installed to control when the public can have access and even charge them for the use so that the owner isn't expected to give away the energy for free! It's also important that we don't put the burden all on residents and businesses; local governments have to figure out innovative ways to offer electric vehicle charging opportunities on public infrastructure.
The segment on our EV charging station can be found here:
https://www.audacy.com/wbbm780/news/local/chicagos-sw-side-receives-first-public-ev-charging-station
