When it’s closing time at The Blue Pig, a sustainable ice cream shop in Croton, owner Nicole Blan hauls composting pails home to her garden. The organic food scraps then nourish the soil that grows the mint, basil, thyme, and lavender infused in The Blue Pig’s handcrafted ice creams and sorbets.
Composting isn’t just an easy way to be sustainable, according to Blan; it’s also a teachable moment for her student scoopers. And better still, the relatively minimal daily effort saves money, too. “Since compost improves the structure of the soil and allows for more moisture retention, I have a consistently lower water bill,” she says.
Committing to environmental sustainability in any form will benefit a company’s bottom line, especially as we continue to weather extreme winters and summers so hot that the ACs struggle to keep up, says Noam Bramson, executive director of Sustainable Westchester, a non-profit formed by Westchester municipalities that’s focused on meeting the challenges of climate change and offering clean energy solutions.
Enrolling in Sustainable Westchester programs such as Demand Response, an initiative designed to reduce energy consumption and prevent blackouts, is one easy option. “We help businesses save money on their energy bills almost immediately, while opening the door to bigger long-term savings through efficiency, building upgrades, and solar systems,” he notes.
That’s what the City School District of New Rochelle did after partnering with Sustainable Westchester and Logical Buildings, a climate technology company. By using Logical Buildings’ SmartKit AI, the facilities teams were able to track when grid demand was highest so they could temporarily reduce electricity use.
“The district earned over $100,000 in 2025 by reducing energy use at 10 school buildings during peak demand periods,” Bramson says. “This saves money while helping to avoid the activation of costly and highly polluting fossil-fuel ‘peaker’ plants, which run only when there’s a higher demand for electricity.”
Tapping into new energy sources
Ask Chris Hale, founder of Sleepy Hollow-based residential solar panel design and installation company SunBlue Energy, about popular misconceptions around harnessing the sun’s energy and he’s happy to explain: “People think that it’s a lot more complicated than it is,” he says. “We’re just contractors who install equipment to help you create your own electricity—just like someone installing an electrical panel in your home.”
What Hale hopes is that more homeowners will recognize solar energy’s great benefits. “Solar energy is so much better than electricity since its source isn’t traveling from far away,” he says. It’s being created and used in the same spot, which is very efficient—especially in the summer when the grid is burdened with the need for a lot of electricity.
In addition, switching over to solar can deliver considerable savings to both homeowners and businesses. “Most residential customers have solar energy systems that produce 60 to 100 percent of their annual electrical usage,” he says. “This saves them around $3,000 per year.”
Likewise, a Sustainable Westchester collaboration with Yonkers Honda called MOVE (Microgrid Optimized Vehicle Electrification), enabled electric vehicle (EV) fast chargers to be installed on site at no cost to the auto dealership.
“This is a terrific model that can serve as an amenity for the general public, for employees and as a way for businesses to show energy leadership,” Bramson says. “The goal as well was to make fast chargers more readily available and overcome ‘range anxiety,’ which is an impediment to EV usage.”
7%
Number of residential rooftops in Westchester that use solar power. “This is ahead of the statewide average, but this also leaves 93 percent of households without solar,” Bramson points out. “There’s tremendous unmet potential here.”
5,000
The number of acres of commercial parking lots with the adequate size and appropriate configuration for solar canopies countywide. “Only 2% of these parking lots currently have canopies,” Bramson says. “If we could increase that to 20 percent that would be sufficient to powering a community larger than White Plains.”
Shipping smarter
For Marissa Gurdian, founder of Sweet Paws, a White Plains pet products company that specializes in nontoxic dog teethers, it’s been a game changer to use the packaging and boxes from her family’s own internet ordering to ship her products to Amazon or to send a Chewy restock order.
“Shipping supplies are surprisingly expensive” she says. Gurdian keeps a pile of repurposable packaging options in a corner of her basement for commercial shipments and estimates that this one step saves her 75 percent on supply costs. “By reusing the cardboard cartons and air cushions we already have on hand, it saves me money and keeps those items out of the landfill.”
In addition, when Gurdian cut in half the packaging size of two other products, bag charms that hold used dog waste bags and silicone bag openers for dog waste bags, she was able to increase the number of products she could pack into one box from 200 to 300.
That decision cut down the overall amount of shipping we’re doing, she explains, adding that while her company used to sell its products in 20 different colors, they are now only available in six color options. “This one change cuts down reorders from our manufacturer, which means we’re using less fuel, which is so much better for the planet.”
The importance of attitude
Back at The Blue Pig, which has already won several sustainability awards, including a recent one from Green Ossining, Blan is constantly researching new ways to reduce the shop’s carbon footprint, including using biodegradable cups, sourcing milk from a nearby dairy farm co-op, and swapping traditional wooden sampling spoons for metal ones.
“Start by doing little things like putting stickers by the lights and encouraging employees and customers to turn them off when they’re not in the room,” she suggests. “We spent a lot of time talking to the teenagers who work for us that even something as simple as using rags instead of paper towels will make a difference.”
The thing about sustainability is that it’s both essential and doable at every level. A city school district can save money; so can a small business owner. Everyone benefits.
The key, Blan says, is that everyone has to buy into sustainability. “Your managers and shift leaders need to be excited about this,” she says. “If I was begrudgingly carrying those composting buckets out of the shop every day, my team would think composting is difficult. Instead, I skip out of here and I even laughed one time when one of the compost buckets overflowed. For this to work, you have to make it fun, not a chore.”
3,000
The number of households enrolled in Grid Rewards, a signature Sustainable Westchester program. “We pay people as much as $250 to $300 a year to reduce their electricity demand during hours of peak usage, like the three to four heat waves during a typical summer,” says Bramson. “It’s great that thousands of people are doing their I part to strengthen the grid, cut pollution, and reduce the risk of blackouts, but there are 300,000 households in Westchester County that could potentially participate.”
Source: Sustainable Westchester
The Sustainable Westchester story
Sustainable Westchester traces its roots back to 2009, when a group of Westchester County municipalities teamed up to create an energy efficiency program targeted to homeowners. Today, an easy-to-navigate website lets you choose the types of programs, such as Grid Rewards and EnergySmart Homes, you’d like to know more about.
“We look for every opportunity to make programming available around the region,” Bramson says. “Our value proposition is that if businesses take the next step and engage with us in business-related programming, they can experience direct cost savings or economic rewards.”
So, whether you’re an individual, a family, a municipality, or a business owner, there are plenty of ways to make changes—today.
“We should avoid any sense of fatalism or conclusion that this is too big for us or that the worst is inevitable,” Bramson says. “Instead, we can all do our part. This isn’t a binary choice between success and failure. Every action adds up and has a positive impact.”
For more information, visit Sustainable Westchester.
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