Oakdale Leads the Pack in Creating Trash on the Job

Oakdale won't win an Oscar for this, unless it's from Sesame Street trashcan resident Oscar the Grouch. 

According to a new website, in 2011 Oakdale created the most on-the-job waste per worker, at 19.41 pounds per day, of 20 Minnesota cities. But Oakdale also recycled the most solid waste per job per day, at 9.45 pounds. 

The new website, Regional Indicators Initiative, reveals how Oakdale stacks up with 15 other Twin Cities suburbs and four big cities (Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester and Duluth) in colorful charts. They show greenhouse gases emitted, solid waste created, vehicle miles traveled, and energy and water used. 

The RII website is "a huge storehouse of local energy data," according to the Star Tribune: 
 
It enables citizens to assess emissions from residential and commercial energy use, transportation and other activities within each of the 20 cities’ borders from 2008 through 2011.  ... Users can sort through the data by adjusting for each city’s population, by the number of households and other factors, including distinctions for residential and commercial and industrial use. The site also has data on waste and water use, as well as on energy bills.

Read the full article at startribune.com. 

Visit the Regional Indicators Initiative website at regionalindicatorsmn.uli.org. To find Oakdale data, click on "Explore the Data" in the menu bar and choose a category. Note that the first graph you see will be for the year 2008 but you can click other years as well as make other selections. To understand what you're looking at, click on "So What?" in the menu bar and then choose "Making Sense of the Numbers."