A new report has estimated that Oregon was home to 51,402 green jobs in 2008. The report, The Greening of Oregon’s Workforce: Jobs, Wages, and Training, was based on a survey of employers and was produced by the Oregon Employment Department.
About half of Oregon’s green jobs were found to be in the construction, retail, and waste services industries. A little more than a quarter of the state’s green jobs workforce worked as carpenters, farm workers, truck drivers, hazardous materials removal workers, and landscaping or grounds keeping personnel.
Green jobs in Oregon paid slightly higher than other jobs on average. The average hourly wage for green jobs in Oregon was $22.61.
Green jobs in Oregon prove to be relatively accessible to the average worker. Close to two-thirds of the state’s green jobs required no more than a high school education, although those that required higher education did pay better. Only a third of green jobs in Oregon required a special license or certificate.
The number of green jobs in Oregon is expected to rise by 14 percent between 2008 and 2010.
A green job was defined as a job providing services or producing products in the following areas:
- Increasing energy efficiency
- Producing renewable energy
- Preventing, reducing, or mitigating environmental degradation
- Cleaning up and restoring the natural environment
- Providing education, consulting, policy promotion, accreditation, trading and offsets, or similar services supporting the above
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Comments: 12
Who pays the salary's of these workers. If they are state workers we the taxpayer have to pay their salary-pensions-vacations-sick days. The last thing we need is to add millions of new government jobs. David are you sure you read the jobs as new jobs or where they those laughhable saved jobs Obama keeps trying to sell us on?
You are a broken record. The last thing we need are more jobs ruining the environment. The last thing we need are jobs that will be outsourced. The last think I need is to be wasting my time reading a post like yours. As far as the taxpayers having to pay for fixing everything that industry has messed up, that should be on the balance sheet of those industries, but they shirk their responsiblities.
Waste services.
I always imagine how many resources are already in our nations landfills ready to be reclaimed. We ought to be spending a lot more effort in what we do with our garbage and waste. Not exactly green and glamorous but probably the low hanging "fruit" when it comes to where the most good can be done to move towards sustainability.
In CT, we are now using single-stream recycling. The area towns MAKE money off our recycled goods by selling them by the ton to the recycling companies. We PAY to have our regular garbage picked up, but we GET money back for recycling.
How is that not a huge no-brainer, even for people like mickie d. who have no brain?
Bruce,
I agree! There is still a lot could be done to improve the amount of waste we produce and the way it is managed. Recycling is an imperfect solution, yet somehow the ideas of "reduce" and "reuse" have been overshadowed by it.
Micky,
I think it is pretty obvious from my article that the survey and report were intended to establish an estimate for the number of green jobs in Oregon - not to estimate the number of new green jobs. Some may be new, some may not be. Not sure where you go the idea that green jobs are government jobs either.
The management of recycled material will get larger in the future and much more important.
In the 70's the largest export out of the Los Angeles harbor was scrap Iron to Japan. The second largest was scrap paper to Japan.
I think it's still those two but now to China.
For years, South Bay Document Destruction Inc., a Gardena company that exports waste paper and cardboard, saw its business boom as demand overseas soared.
But suddenly, its business is in the trash can in the Macintosh, a simulated garbage can used for deleting files and folders. The trash can keeps the files intact in case the user wants to restore them, but can be "emptied" from time to time to save disk space.
Towering stacks of paper are building up on its one-acre lot, so it stopped accepting recycled paper from the public and for the first time it is charging a fee to pick up old cardboard boxes from groceries and the like.
Recycled paper is the biggest export by volume from the ports of Los Angeles, city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. It is bought mainly by Chinese paper See India paper, under India.
The largest in volume is empty containers now.
Cleaning up areas and recycling the content should become a priority as well. If we had the intestinal fortitude, we could go a long way toward reclaiming land and oceans while creating jobs.
This is great news, David. We need to see more news like this. We have been noticing in the investment world large companies buying up smaller companies devoted to energy efficiency and construction. They know that there's money in this area in the future.
Yes David this report (and hopefully more from other states) will allow us track our progress towards a cleaner society.
Just read an article in the newspaper that said for every {1} green job created- 2.2 pvt. sector jobs lost.
Micky,
Given that we are in the middle of a major recession, it is not at all surprising that jobs are being lost. If you are suggesting that creating green jobs somehow causes job loss, how about some evidence to back up your claim?