ABSTRACT
Londonderry, NH, was seeking an economic development strategy to establish itself as a viable location for industrial development, when the concept of eco-industrial development fell into its lap. Stonyfield Farms Yoghurt (hereafter referred to as Stonyfield) was approached by a company that wanted to locate a plastic recycling operation on the vacant land next to it to utilise Stonyfield’s grey water to rinse the plastics. The town had acquired this land from a previous developer a few years earlier for failure to pay taxes. Stonyfield Farms is an environmentally conscious, socially responsible firm intrigued by the opportunities that industrial ecology presented to it and to its host community. Londonderry saw this as an opportunity to attract companies similar to Stonyfield to the community and to create a win-win situation for industry and the environment. The town and Stonyfield decided to explore the opportunity to create an ecological industrial park on the 100 acres of town-owned land adjacent to Stonyfield. Thus was born the sustainable economic development strategy that has come to be called ‘Sustainable Londonderry’. In a presentation to the American Planning Association, I stated that:
grew from a sleepy agricultural community of 2,000 people in 1960 to its present size when Interstate 93 was built in the early 1960s. During the past three decades Londonderry’s agricultural heritage has come under assault as one of the fastest-growing communities in New Hampshire. Rapid uncontrolled growth has brought its share of problems to this region. Shopping centres sprawl where apple orchards once grew. Town infrastructure such as schools and police and fire departments have been striving to ‘catch up’, yet operations are not properly scaled to population size. Today, the community continues to grapple with growth-related issues.
