TURI Loses Funding... maybe.

We recently learned that the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI) is losing its Massachusetts state funding. This strikes particularly close to home for me as I worked briefly with TURI after grad school and was quite impressed with the caliber of their work (and yes, full disclosure, I still have friends there). TURI is one of a select few organizations nationally that successfully champions the needs of both industry and the environment — for 20 years now they've been finding that practical common ground where we can really move forward in widespread adoption of safer alternatives.

With our GreenSpec directory, editors at BuildingGreen constantly struggle to assess the use of a plethora of toxics in building products and manufacturing processes to determine what constitutes safe and healthy products and still gets the practical job done of building quality green buildings today. This requires the kind of pragmatic alternatives assessment that TURI excels at. The lessons I learned at TURI and their current research are a great help in my work here and it would be a huge loss to see their services cut.

This isn't a done deal. There is an effort afoot this week to get a supplemental budget appropriation that would allocate $1.2 million of the business fees collected from TURA filers to support the continued operation of TURI — back to the original financing model that pays for itself with the companies using toxics paying for the reduction program.

People living in Massachusetts can support the effort this week by contacting their representatives and asking them to sign onto the letter to Massachusetts House and Senate leadership requesting the appropriation. I did just that and was pleasantly surprised at the quick and positive response from my reps. Anyone from anywhere can comment on online articles about TURI and make it clear this self-funding program is too good to lose.

This kind of thing goes beyond Massachusetts and TURI. The battle to retain the high-quality, high-impact green jobs we already have, as well as remake our struggling economy into a thriving green one, is going on across the nation through skirmishes like this one — and it is in these local and state level debates where a few voices can sometimes make a surprising difference.

More information in BuildingGreen Suite: Funding Cut for Toxics Reduction.