With one heat wave just ended and another one about to begin, climate change is probably on the minds of more Lancaster County residents these days.
From July 4 through July 10, local temperatures exceeded 90 degrees every day, reaching the mid-90s over most of that period. Looking ahead, highs are forecast to return to the 90s from Saturday through Wednesday, possibly reaching as high as 98 on Tuesday.
Nationwide, temperature records are falling left and right. Worldwide, 2023 was the hottest year on record; as of June, world temperatures had remained 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — a threshold considered critical for containing climate change impacts — for 12 straight months.
RegenAll is a local nonprofit dedicated to making Lancaster County carbon-neutral by 2040. It held its second annual Climate Summit in April; earlier this month, it posted a video recap on YouTube:

In an interview with One United Lancaster, RegenAll Founder and Chief Operating Officer Eric Sauder said local businesses and other organizations that want to implement climate-friendly solutions have more resources to do so, thanks to provisions in the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, a major spending bill passed in 2022.
Previously, organizations had to patch together funding scrap by scrap, he said. Now, “it’s an implementation game,” and there’s a chance to make a real difference,” he said.
Sauder believes Lancaster County’s size and makeup make it an ideal place to pilot community-led solutions to climate change. It’s good to have an “annual check-in” like the summit, he said, to re-energize participants and see what progress has been made over the past 12 months.

Business initiatives
At one summit breakout session, representatives from Eurofins, the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority (LCSWMA) and Sahd Metal Recycling discussed their carbon-reduction initiatives.
Eurofins, which operates the former Lancaster Labs facility in Upper Leacock Township, aims to become carbon neutral by next year, said Christina Leslie, senior director of corporate sustainability. Its strategies include a a mix of changes in company practices along with carbon offset purchases. Locally, it is promoting green transportation (including electric vehicles, carpooling and biking), waste reduction and greening its campus.

LCSWMA’s Waste-to-Energy Facility reduces landfill consumption by 90%, said Michelle March, chief business & compliance officer. Landfills are major emitters of methane, which is 28 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide; every ton of trash that goes to the Waste-to-Energy facility instead saves the equivalent of 1 ton of CO2, March said.
Steel production accounts for about 7% of total worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, said Dan Sahd of Sahd Metal Recycling. One major strategy for reducing that impact is to recycle steel scrap in electric arc furnaces, which reduces energy use by around 85%. Both steel production facilities in our area, in Coatesville and Steelton, are electric arc, he said.

Municipal efforts
In another presentation, Molly Deger, Lancaster city’s deputy director of public works, and Douglas Smith, chief planner, discussed the city’s various environmental and land use plans. (Smith has since left city government for a job with the U.S. Green Building Council.)

Currently, Lancaster has more than 80 rain gardens and other “green infrastructure” installations that prevent 65 million gallons a year of stormwater from flowing into its sewers, Deger said. Unfortunately, climate change is making rainfall more intense, complicating the challenge the city faces.
Traditional urban development patterns, like those seen in Lancaster city, have numerous benefits, Smith said: Residents can walk or bike instead of driving; a row home takes up far less land than a suburban split-level. The city’s recently adopted comprehensive plan, Our Future Lancaster, aims to preserve and extend those benefits and “resonate with the character of the city we love.”
Lancaster County’s boroughs have the same “building blocks” that Lancaster does, he said, but land use policies outside the city tend to favor car-based sprawl. With county population projected to grow by 36,000 over the next 15 years, continuing business as usual would eat up irreplaceable farmland, exacerbate the county’s housing crisis and worsen environmental impacts.

“This is a really important question,” he said.
Nadine Garner, a professor of Millersville University and head of its Sustainability Committee, said she “couldn’t be happier” with the summit and the collaborations and ideas it engendered.
“That’s really what we wanted,” she said.
“We wanted a forum for people to get together, not only to hear from local experts, but to walk away with actionable steps that they can take for themselves.”