Norfolk Now

Our plans for the City of Norfolk will vastly improve the quality of living downtown. Our ideas encompass harnessing buildings with solar panels, establish rooftop gardens to supply the surrounding restaurants with produce grown by local community farmers; this will improve the city economy. Also with the installation of composition facilities, we can manage the organic waste created by restaurants and our gardens. Another sustainable action would to be creating a system for water conservation, Norfolk now floods horribly when it rains, so why not capture as much as the rain water as possible and use it in a system of rain barrels. The rain barrels would capture the water, which we can then apply this water to the rooftop gardens that we have started.

An aerial view of Downtown Norfolk and the unoccupied rooftops. The plan is to establish either solar panels or produce gardens.

Many of these broad unused spaces are going to waist. It would benefit the people of Norfolk to actively engage in the participation of creating a greener, sustainable city.

Old Dominion can only move forward. Sustainability on the ODU campus has not been all that special until these plans are adopted. The improvements to the campus will only benefit. The initial costs of some of these sustainable investments are fairly expensive. But the long term results of things such as solar panels and compost gardens will benefit all of the students, faculty, and locals. The empty spaces on the roof now would become gardens or spaces for solar panels. These simple ideas are only a small step in the right direction. But combining them will build this campus here at Old Dominion University into a sustainable campus of the future.