August 5, 2009—The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently released its list of the greenest cities in the United States and posted the findings on a new Web site, called Smarter Cities.
The survey includes all cities in the United States with populations larger than 50,000. Smarter Cities is considered to be one of the nations most comprehensive and robust database of U.S. urban progress toward sustainability.
The cities are grouped into three size categories to enable comparison between those with similar environmental challenges and constraints on social and financial resources. Seattle ranked number one and San Francisco ranked number two among the 67 large cities that were evaluated. Madison, Wisconsin placed first and Santa Rosa, California came in second among the 176 medium cities that were surveyed.
Among the 402 smaller cities that were evaluated, Bellingham, Washington came in first place and Mountain View, California came in second.
The cities were ranked on the criteria of air quality, energy production and conservation, environmental standards and participation, green building, green space, recycling, transportation, standard of living, and water quality and conservation.
Each city was also ranked separately by each of those criteria and you can see those scores as well below.
