It’s a sustainable cure for the industrial hangover: take those old abandoned factories, former mines and dump sites, and use them as sites for solar, wind, hydropower, and other clean energy. The EPA has powered up a formerly patchwork reclamation effort into a program called Re-Powering America’s Lands that is also designed to bring new green jobs into communities distressed by factory closings.
We’ve written about the link between green jobs and brownfields reclamation before at CleanTechnica, and Environmental Leader has a nice article up on the topic that mentions some of the individual projects. It’s worth taking a look at the details to see how brownfields reclamation is unlocking a great potential for economic growth that in many cases has been languishing for decades.