Omar Freilla grew up in the South Bronx amid burnt-out buildings, waste transfer stations and power plants. He spent his childhood watching the PBS show “Nature,” dazzled by scenes of pristine wilderness—the rainforest, the mountains and the arctic. “There was one thing that always bothered me about those shows, though,” he recalled in a talk at a Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California. “You never saw any people on them.”

The South Bronx is the environment, however, for those who live there, and Freilla is quick to point out a few of the grim statistics. Twenty-five percent of New York City’s waste stream is handled here as well as more than half of its sewage sludge. A parade of exhaust-spewing diesel trucks hauls the city’s trash here every day to more than fifteen transfer stations within a one-mile radius. The South Bronx has one of the highest hospitalization rates for children with asthma, according to the NYC Department of Health.

Freilla, a leader in the environmental justice movement, aims to make the South Bronx a healthier place to live and work by linking sustainable energy, economics and jobs. He wants to turn the local waste transfer stations into re-use centers for the community. Through his Green Worker Cooperatives, he intends to launch “a worker-owned Home Depot in the South Bronx” in which usable building material destined for landfills are recycled into functional items such as cabinets, floors and doors.

In addition to conserving energy, a re-use center also would reduce pollution and create healthy, environmentally sustainable jobs for South Bronx residents, who are often pressed to work in polluting facilities. “It makes sense,” Freilla says. “We need jobs. People are tired of pollution, tired of asthma. People are hungry for a solution.”

The worker-owned cooperatives Freilla envisions challenge the assumption that protecting the environment is at odds with jobs and economic development. This re-emerging model also turns the typical hierarchy of the workplace on its head: workers co-own the business and split the profits.

The most immediate challenge faced by Green Worker Cooperatives is financing the warehouse space. Freilla hopes to gain financial backing from New York City to turn his plan into a citywide project. As the recipient of $50,000 dollars from the Union Square Awards, he and Green Worker Cooperatives are off to a good start.

If implemented citywide, Freilla’s Green Worker Cooperatives would cut energy consumption and depletion of environmental resources (thus reducing global warming effects) while improving the quality of life for residents. Ultimately, his vision would dramatically improve health and economic prospects in one of the nation’s poorest urban regions by creating an entirely new kind of employment: green collar jobs.

Amy Landau is HopeDance’s roving reporter living in New York City. She can be reached at Amy.Landau@gmail.com . Reprinted with kind permission from Hopedance, www.hopedance.org or call 805-544-9663.