This paper reports a significant new addition to the tools available to government and industrial leaders in deciding future land use for various manufacturing facilities, including chemicals. The development of measurements that relate environmental and economic performance for production processes is an excellent way for many companies to begin the implementation of sustainable business practices. Practical Sustainability has developed and refined indicators and metrics that are useful as a management tools in a wide range of industries. Through a set of decision rules validated by companies, a complement of cost-effective, robust metrics has been developed to capture five important indicators of environmental performance and relate them to output. Now, a sixth basic metric and two new complementary metrics have been developed to incorporate land-use into decision-making. Land use metrics were developed from a number of sources and examine land use parameters for more than 10,000 sites in more than 1O0 four-digit SIC classes within North America. The new metrics focus on revenue generated per land area, jobs created per land area and toxic and hazardous emissions per land area for each class of business. Examples will be given, as will specific cases where the metrics aid governments, native peoples and the public at large to judge what industries should be considered and chosen in urban redevelopment, Greenfield and Brownfield decisions and land reclamation.
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