Communities seeking a new marriage between the environment and business to transform brownfields and other underutilized land now can draw on the comprehensive resources of Cornell University.

Following a study by researchers at Cornell and Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the emergence throughout the United States of eco-industrial parks, the Eco-Industrial Development Program has been established at Cornell's Center for the Environment to help more communities plan for an economically and environmentally sustainable future.

"We assert that lean-and-clean networked manufacturing combined with favorable regulatory and community support mechanisms has the greatest chance of minimizing the ecological impact of industry and improving business performance in the 21st century," said Edward Cohen-Rosenthal, director of the Work and Environment Initiative at the Cornell Center for the Environment and a co-author of the report "Designing Eco-Industrial Parks: The North American Experience."

"Most probably, the formula for eco-industrial development -- the networked sharing of resources to reduce pollution and waste -- will work anywhere, including in the undeveloped 'greenfields' where manufacturing has never occurred," Cohen-Rosenthal observed. "But we believe the way to minimize environmental impact and demonstrate eco-responsibility is to re-use the brownfields land. That is the ultimate in recycling."

Brownfields are sites where industrial use has left the land contaminated -- but not to the toxic extent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund clean-up sites -- or left it with the perception of contamination. New industries often are unwilling to locate at brownfields because of the immediate cost of cleanup and because of continuing liability for remaining contaminants.

Almost all American cities have brownfields, as does Chattanooga, Tenn., where a former glass-manufacturing site is under consideration for possible redevelopment as an eco-industrial park. Other cities that were the first to be designated by the President's Council on Sustainable Development as demonstration sites for eco-industrial parks are Baltimore, Md.; Cape Charles, Va.; and Brownsville, Texas.

Those four pioneering cities form the core of Cornell's Eco-Industrial Development Program, which has now expanded to serve others. Among the next to join were Trenton, N.J., another brownfield-burdened city that hopes to "green" local institutions, create new businesses and go after expanding and relocating companies; and Plattsburgh, a city in northern New York with an increasingly common burden as the American military downsizes: a decommissioned U.S. Air Force base.

"The former Plattsburgh Air Force Base is an ideal site for eco-working, eco-living and eco-recreation," Cohen-Rosenthal said, citing to the 3,400-acre site's access to all forms of transportation, its proximity to Montreal, the frontage on Lake Champlain and the 1,500 abandoned housing units that planners are eyeing as vacation villas or temporary housing. "Plattsburgh could also be a testing ground for solar power and new developments in aviation," Cohen-Rosenthal said.

Communities participating in Cornell's Eco-Industrial Development Program receive assistance in four areas needed to turn abandoned brownfields into thriving, sustainable, eco-industrial enterprises: market research and development, environmental excellence, business excellence and community engagement and involvement.

"The Eco-Industrial Development Program," Cohen-Rosenthal said, "will facilitate practical research and learning that will lead to 'better, faster, cleaner' economic development." Participants in and advisers to the program first met in Cape Charles, Va., in October and plan to convene again in Brownsville and in Plattsburgh.

Although some of the information developed by individual communities is specific to their situations -- for example the findings on Baltimore, which can be seen on the World Wide Web at -- the tools and techniques developed through the project are in the public domain and are available to any interested community, noted Walter R. Lynn, director of the Cornell Center for the Environment and Cornell professor of civil and environmental engineering. "As a land grant institution, Cornell's mission is to spread applied research for the public benefit," he said.

The program and its staff of researchers, business facilitators, environmental scientists and pollution-prevention engineers draw on an array of university resources. Among them are the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and its Programs for Employment and Workplace Systems, the Johnson Graduate School of Management, the College of Engineering, the Waste Management Institute, Water Resources Institute and Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology. Further, the Eco-Industrial Development Program is working in close collaboration with a number of strategic partners, including the U.S. Department of Energy's Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development, Morgan State University, the University of Tennessee's Center for Clean Products, the Maryland Alliance for Labor Management Cooperation and the U.S. Facilities Management Corp.

"The overarching goal of the program is to facilitate the spread of various types of eco-industrial development projects in communities all across the United States," Cohen-Rosenthal said. "We won't be content with creating 'model exceptions.' We have to grow and propagate new, more effective, sustainable development approaches."