Got a great green idea?

Get your thinking caps on, Toronto. The city has plans to pay its citizens to go green. Starting next month, staff with the Live Green Toronto program – which will receive $20 million in city funding over five years – will begin meeting with residents to discuss carbon-saving projects it will help subsidize. With an initial target of a 6 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2012, Mayor David Miller said the plan’s success depends on residents creating change.

“We won’t meet our ambitious targets if we don’t have the support of every Torontonian and every Toronto-based business,” Miller said yesterday at the Green Living Show.

City council still has to sign off on the criteria for the public to receive grants to develop green project ideas and get money to share the costs of buying equipment and materials. Once that is done, likely next month, the project will begin. It will start with “activators,” environmentalists working for non-governmental agencies who will meet with residents to lead them through the idea stage, then the application process, and finally help get the work done.

One example of a project is a solar-heated water system. Another example: an inventory of neighbourhood trees, with the goal of planting more on private property and public parks.

Grants for the idea development stage will run from $1,000 to $25,000. Subsidies for capital projects range from $25,000 to $250,000. The city wants to lower carbon emissions 30 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

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