The Earth Day Network, the Clean Air Campaign and UPS have launched a campaign that challenges an American tradition – idling your car outside the neighborhood school while waiting to scoop up the munchkins.

The groups are targeting active idlers because the practice needlessly pollutes the air, contributing to global warming and aggravating kids’ respiratory health issues.

UPS is funding the effort with a $350,000 grant that helps supply students, teachers, parents and community leaders with “toolkits” and educational material for bus drivers and parents. Schools can get signs for car pool lanes, educational material for children and curriculum guides for teachers at the EDN website.

“Turning off your engine while waiting to pick up your child is such a simple step to help everyone breathe cleaner air, save money on gas and reduce emissions all at the same time,” said Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network, in a news release announcing the program today.

“Vehicle idling wastes fuel and money. In fact, idling for 30 seconds uses more fuel than restarting your engine, and idling for 10 minutes a day wastes an average of 24.6 gallons of gas per year.” (Tell that to our crossing guard and her idling truck!)

It almost goes without saying, but kids are more affected by this ambient air pollution than anyone, because their lungs are still developing.

“In fact, particle pollution and ground level ozone and can aggravate asthma and contribute to increased upper-respiratory infections,” says Kevin Green, executive director of The Clean Air Campaign.

For Atlanta-based UPS, the national program is an expansion of a previous partnership with the Clean Air Campaign in Georgia. The Clean Air Campaign is a Georgia non-profit that works with employers to help find commuting solutions, reduce highway congestion and improve air quality.

Earth Day Network is the clearinghouse for Earth Day, with thousands of partner organizations in 174 countries.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

With winter weather at its most aggressive about now, it’s hard not to notice all the idlers in our midst. They’re idling at fast food restaurants, outside offices and schools. You find a business, there’s a car idling outside. Some people take their right to idle pretty seriously. Police cruisers sometimes idle while they lie in wait and will get no argument from me. Ditto crossing guards, for different reasons.

I am not suggesting that we regular folks suffer frozen feet nobly in the name of curbing carbon emissions. I’m all for necessary feet-saving measures. But I have noticed that my car stays warm for a little while after I’ve been driving it. You notice that? Do I really need to idle while my teenager tarries at the bookstore checkout? Reaallly? No, I don’t. Do I need to warm up in the driveway before heading to an appointment? Not anymore. Experts say modern engines do just fine with a cold start. Do I need to keep the car especially toasty, while someone runs into the bakery for bread? No — and neither did the woman I noticed last week in a big hulking truck that idled while someone else got the bread. Humpff!

OK, I agree, this is a little thing, in the large scheme of things. But did you know that two minutes of idling is the equivalent of driving one mile, according to the Consumer Energy Center ?

It might be worth thinking about. A hundred million Americans idling less — and thinking more. It could help.

And while you’re at it, check those tires to make sure they’re properly inflated.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

When David Kilbourne picked up his 8-year-old son from Lake Travis Elementary in spring 2007, he noticed smoke billowing from idling buses parked in queue behind the school. The exhaust fumes his son was breathing each day as he waited to be picked up, he says, were contributing to his son’s migraine headaches. “My son is the quarterback for his youth football team,” said Kilbourne. “Because there’s only one quarterback, when he gets these headaches, it affects the team.”

Kilbourne remembers noticing the bus exhaust during the school’s bus safety week. “They were talking about how buses are safe when it comes to traffic accidents,” he said, “but there’s more to a bus’s safety than traffic accidents, like having air that’s safe to breathe.”

The coincidence spurred Kilbourne to take action. Not only did he write several letters to his local newspaper, but Kilbourne approached the head of his district’s transportation department to discuss air quality in and around its buses. After he spoke to Rick Walterscheid, the transportation director at the Lake Travis Independent School District, the school system put a no-idling policy into effect.

Walterscheid didn’t stop there, either. Later that year the 79th Texas Legislature adopted House Bill 3469, which established and authorized the formation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to administer a statewide clean school bus program.

With the goal of reducing diesel exhaust emissions, TCEQ offers grants to all Texas public school districts and charter schools that operate at least one diesel-fueled school bus. The TCEQ’s grants offset the cost of school district’s sometimes daunting costs to retrofit school buses, as well as other projects that reduce emissions of diesel exhaust.

Lake Travis ISD, located in a Hill Country suburb of Austin, Texas, was among more than 50 Texas school districts that were eligible for TCEQ’s funding in 2007. That year, Walterscheid’s district applied for and received more than $80,000 in grant money to retrofit a portion of its fleet of buses.

Walterscheid, who manages a fleet of 76 buses that shuttle about 2,500 students each day, said the district’s students are all breathing a little easier these days with help from the TCEQ and its grant program.

“Looking back, the process wasn’t that difficult,” he says, explaining that the district put diesel particulate filters on nine of its buses last year, resulting in “a 90% improvement (in emissions).”

Lake Travis ISD is certainly among the trend setters; one of several districts nationwide that have made firm commitments to clean the air its students and others breathe. This growing national trend includes school districts adopting no-idling policies and those moving to alternative fuels as well.

Nationally, several large city school systems have retrofitted many of their school buses to reduce harmful emissions, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, which is leading a campaign to clean up school buses nationwide.

The non-profit environmental group reports that the entire fleet of New York City’s 4,070 large buses is scheduled to be retrofitted by 2008; Atlanta has installed passive filters on 353 long school buses and Boston has retrofitted 328 school buses.

Environmental Defense points to the NYC plan and Texas’ program, which is better funded than many, as model projects. Parents and educators can get up to speed on the basic steps to take at ED’s Four Steps to Cleaner Buses.

FIXING THE PROBLEM

In recent years, several environmental groups have documented that exhaust from diesel-fueled buses make the safe ride to school a truly unhealthy one. Diesel exhaust comprises a cauldron of cancer-causing agents: particulate matter (or soot), smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and a complex mixture of gases. Studies have found that those gases don’t stay outside the bus, either, but permeate the interior.

This “indoor pollution” problem has wide implications: An estimated 24 million children get to class by riding school buses in the United States.

In Texas, with some 1.3 million children hopping on its more than 36,000 buses each school day, the pollution problem for the children is compounded by their sometimes lengthy commutes.

Many school buses in Texas haven’t been making the grade. More than a third of the school buses in the state are more than 10 years old. Not only do these older buses emit more pollution than newer models but they expose children unnecessarily to diesel exhaust, which has been found to make breathing even harder for children with asthma and other respiratory problems.

“Mr. Kilbourne raised my awareness of how we can affect a student,” said Walterscheid. “Talking to him brought to the forefront the issues that we needed to address and made the decision to apply for retrofit funding with the TCEQ that much easier.” <!–nextpage–>

“The school buses we run are the only mode of transportation for many students whose parents both work,” says Walterschied. “So, some parents don’t have a choice of whether or not to put their children on the bus. We are here to serve and we have the duty to improve the situation that students have to be in.”

A handful of organizations fund the effort of retrofitting school buses to make the drive to and from school healthier for children. The TCEQ is the primary organization that heads up bus retrofitting in Texas. The Texas Parent Teachers Association, through its Supplemental Environment Program, helps fund retrofitting, as well, but at a lesser extent.

The Texas Emissions Reduction Plan (TERP) has set aside money for retrofitting expenses, but the organization is primarily focused on funding replacement of school buses, which can cost up to $85,000 apiece.

“It’s ideal for school districts to ask for and get as many new buses as they can,” says Hazel Barbour, program manager for Clean School Bus Program of Central Texas, which is run through a partnership with Clean Air Force and the Capital Area Council of Governments. Barbour’s program assists several Texas counties, including Travis, Williamson, Hayes, Caldwell, Bastrop, and others. As part of her role with the Clean School Bus Program she assists districts in filling out the necessary forms to apply for retrofitting grants and getting the necessary bids for the work to be done.

Retrofitting work is bid on and performed by contractors approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board, which together ensure that retrofitters meet certain standards.

Four retrofitting options have been approved for funding through the TCEQ. These include:

• Diesel particulate filters, which can cost from $6,500 to $8,250, are ceramic devices that collect particulate matter in the exhaust system and require a high temperature to break down the matter in the exhaust system. These filters must be used in conjunction with ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) fuel. The combination of particulate filters and ULSD fuel can reduce emissions of particulates, organic compounds, and carbon monoxide in the exhaust gases by 60 to 90 percent. They work best on engines built after 1994.

• Closed crankcase filtration systems, allow a diesel engine’s crankcase to be closed and use an air filter to trap blow-by aerosols consisting mainly of oil droplets with some carbon and traces of “wear debris” and all particles that are smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter. These particles are considered “inhalable”, because they are small enough to pass into the lower airways. Blow-by gas emissions can be as much as 25 percent of the total emissions from a diesel engine. The filtration efficiency of crankcase filters averages between 80 and 97 percent, but the crankcase filter must be changed at every lube oil change or every 500 hours of operation. Crankcase filters are inexpensive and are best used in conjunction with some type of filtration system in the exhaust stream. These systems may be more effective at reducing children’s in-cabin exposures to pollutants than control systems fitted into the exhaust systems alone. The devices are reimbursed at $800 per bus.

• Diesel oxidation catalysts, which cost from $600 to $1,500, chemically break down pollutants in the exhaust stream to reduce particulate matter in emissions. Diesel oxidation catalysts can reduce emissions of particulates by 20 to 40 percent, hydrocarbons by 50 percent and carbon monoxide by 40 percent and can be used with regular diesel fuel.

• Partial flow-through filters comprise a fitting on tailpipes that uses a two-stage filter to accumulate and reduce particulate matter emissions by 70 to 75 percent. This type of retrofit can also reduce total vehicle emissions by up to 80 percent when paired with a closed crankcase filtration system. It is designed to be maintenance-free and can be used with ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) fuel. This type of retrofit costs $5,000 to $6,000.

Costs for retrofitting can be daunting for school districts without the help. However, emissions from school buses drop by as much as 90% when engines and exhaust systems are retrofitted. <!–nextpage–>

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency maintains a list of vendors who sell retrofit devices. Companies the likes of Caterpillar, Clean Diesel Technologies, and PUREM North America supply school districts with diesel particulate filters, for example.

In Texas, about $8 million worth of grant money is available for the 2008 application period, according to TCEQ officials. Districts have through November 14 to apply and until March 31, 2009 to complete retrofits. School districts can make as many grant requests as they like up to $250,000 per grant request. For more info see the TCEQ FAQ.

Walterscheid’s Lake Travis Independent School District applied for $99,700 in ‘08 grant money to retrofit 20 of its buses with partial flow-through filters. When this next retrofitting is completed, Lake Travis will boast 29 retrofitted buses district-wide that will exceed state and federal requirements for environmental standards.

“When this grant funding was announced, there was hesitance with the technology,” said Walterscheid. “We had concerns that the engine wouldn’t get hot enough to burn diesel particulates, so we’ve put those (retrofitted) buses on our longer routes.”

BREATHING DIESEL FUMES

A study conducted jointly by the Environmental Defense, The Clean Air Task Force, and The Conroe Independent School District at The Woodlands, north of Houston, in Texas shines some light on the real culprits of the diesel exhaust systems.

Published in March 2007, Measuring Pollution Levels Inside Texas School Buses points to the bus’s tailpipe and open crankcase as the primary sources of air pollution. (See also this page on the study’s findings.)

The bus’s crankcase is located a few feet from the bus’s front door and vents to the air. When the door opens and closes, exhaust re-enters the vehicle during the course of a daily route.

“Several studies show that air pollution levels inside the school buses can be up to five times greater than levels outside the bus,” the report states.

Children, particularly those with asthma or respiratory problems, are at a greater risk because they breathe more rapidly than adults, they inhale more pollutants per pound of body weight, and their bodies aren’t equipped with a strong defense system. Even if for short periods of time, exposure to diesel exhaust pollution is linked to dizziness, coughing, chronic bronchitis, and increased incidence and severity of asthma attacks.

According to The Burden of Asthma in Texas report, published in May 2007 by the Texas Department of State Health Services and the Asthma Coalition of Texas, “asthma remains one of the most prevalent chronic diseases and growing health concerns in Texas and is one of the most frequent reasons for hospital admissions among children.”

Reports estimate that some 390,000 to as many as 600,000 children in Texas have asthma. (For more info, see this Burden of Asthma in Texas report.)

Multiply that across the nation, and it is easy to understand why there’s a growing trend across the U.S. to retrofit buses to clean up emissions and also to use alternative, cleaner-burning forms of fuel.

Many U.S. schools have transitioned to other forms of less-polluting fuels for their bus fleets. Compressed natural gas (CNG) is used widely in Europe and South America and in the US, this fossil fuel substitute for gasoline and diesel is becoming more widely available, particularly in California, where it’s used to power city and county bus fleets, and now school buses.

Biodiesel, mostly a plant-based fuel, also is growing in popularity. According to the July-August 2007 issue of The Futurist magazine, biodiesel should experience explosive growth within the next 10 years because it can be used in diesel engines without any modifications to the engine: “More than 80% of all commercial trucks and city buses run on diesel gas. This suggests a huge potential market for biodiesel in the U.S.”

The Clark County school district in Nevada has been making inroads into clean-burning buses for several years. The fifth-largest school district in the nation., it serves the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Boulder City, and Mesquite, and is believed to have the largest fleet of school buses fueled by biodiesel.

The district fuels its buses with recycled cooking oil, sourced from area restaurants. And since Las Vegas is a popular tourist town that never sleeps, the area generates six gallons of oil per resident each year – twice the national average. This clean fleet of school buses saves the environment from untold carbon emissions, according to the Las Vegas Regional Clean Cities Coalition, leaving only a whiff of fumes whose worst offense would be to cause hunger pangs.

Yes, the buses in Clark County smell like french fries.

(Clark County Buses, above. Photo Credit: Catherine Colbert.)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Not long ago, a City of Austin crew spent the day installing new “No Parking” signs along the streets of my neighborhood. Two big Ford F450 trucks sat outside my home-office window for hours while the men dug holes and planted posts — and their engines ran the entire time.

Not wanting to be the block’s eco-scold, I said nothing as the trucks rumbled. But the waste of fuel nagged at me even after the noise was gone, and I eventually called the city to find out why workers would be allowed to run their engines like that. Surely the city didn’t approve of polluting the air all morning just so the truck would be pre-air-conditioned when workers took a coffee break?

After calls to three or four city departments, I found a public works supervisor with some answers. All work trucks keep their engines running, she told me, because of the LED arrow boards mounted on them which warn drivers to keep their distance. “You can’t turn the engine off and keep the arrows going, because your battery will die down,” she said.

It was easy to see how a safety-based practice might serve as an excuse to keep the cab cooled off, even when running the arrow was unnecessary: In my case, the truck was parked on a dead-end block where no traffic could approach from behind it. The woman I spoke with agreed that conserving fuel wasn’t the easiest topic to raise with work crews. “They’ve been here a while,” she said, “and when I mention this they kind of get, ‘Well, fine, what do you want us to do for safety?’”

With any luck, Austin street crews won’t have that excuse much longer. Jennifer Wells, a deputy fleet officer, says the city has “recently applied for grant money for auxiliary power units, which would power equipment that they’d normally have to use the truck engine to power. We’d run off a battery instead.” (”We’re only buying solar-powered arrow boards from here on out,” she adds.)

Wells says the city is also “putting together a conservation task force” that will write a policy on idling to govern all public vehicles. Currently, the only anti-idling law in Austin applies solely to trucks weighing more than 14,000 pounds.

That’s odd for a town so proud of its other green accomplishments, especially considering the efforts other cities have taken to curb idling. A “Best Practices” report issued by the U.S. Conference of Mayors last year, for instance, notes anti-idling policies in places like Charlotte, NC and Indianapolis, IN; Minneapolis, MN adopted an anti-idling law in June; and the state of New Jersey prohibits all vehicles from idling (with exceptions) for more than three minutes at a time. The EPA has attempted to corral the many laws adopted by states, counties, and local governments here, but it’s a list that keeps growing.

Those laws may sound like window-dressing efforts that won’t be enforced by traffic cops, but anecdotal evidence and articles in trucking-industry magazines suggest otherwise. (This one reports travel-plaza cameras catching idlers in New Jersey and lists fines across the country that range from a hundred bucks to twenty-five grand or prison time.) Of Minneapolis’s new law, spokesperson Matt Laible says, that while the city is initially “focusing on public education” before enforcing its $200 fine, “so far this year, we’ve received 21 calls to our 311 system reporting vehicle idling,” which suggests that cops will have help from green-minded citizens.

Of course, bringing this issue up in the summer may terrify readers who live in places where August heat could almost cook an egg in a car even with the windows rolled down. Even in the most eco-conscious city, a parent dashing into the store for a gallon of milk on a 110-degree day is unlikely to draw ire for leaving the AC running for the kids; the Minneapolis ordinance, for instance, allows that “Vehicles may idle up to 15 minutes in a one hour period if the outside air temperature is less than zero degrees or higher than 90 degrees.”

Many drivers may have the false impression that laws against idling are hurting their cars or pocketbooks in the name of clean air — that turning the engine off and restarting it causes undue engine wear or wastes more gas than it saves. That may have been true for cars a few decades ago, but no longer: From the California Energy Commission (which points out that “for every two minutes a car is idling, it uses about the same amount of fuel it takes to go about one mile”) to the Florida Section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, those myths have been thoroughly debunked.

The accepted rule of thumb for a modern car is that after ten seconds, idling uses more gas than turning the engine off and then back on; unless you’re in traffic that may resume at a moment’s notice, you should kill the engine. As for excess wear, a Canadian study cited in this Slate
article claims that “obeying the 10-second rule will add roughly $10 to a driver’s annual maintenance bill” while saving (at today’s prices) over thirty bucks’ worth of gas.

Trying to put the issue in perspective, Slate points out that “if every one of the nation’s 196 million licensed drivers reduced their idling by 10 minutes per day,” the reduction in CO2 emissions would only amount to “about 0.2 percent of the carbon dioxide that was emitted in the United States in 2006.”

But as any school crossing-guard can tell you, plenty of parents spend far more than 10 minutes a day idling as they wait to pick kids up — and school buses traditionally have done the same. Recognizing that buses are often among a community’s biggest polluters, and that the kids they carry are particularly vulnerable to polluted air, the EPA runs an awareness campaign on the issue while states and individual school districts have their own programs aimed at replacing older vehicles and greening the ones on the road.

The Environmental Defense Fund matches content to style with a “4R” school bus campaign that echoes the old “reading, writing, ‘rithmatic” mantra and the newer “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Gutsily, they’ve chosen to launch one of their two regional efforts in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry set right-minded heads shaking last year by vetoing a bus-idling ban that seemed to have support even from his old colleague George Bush.

(The ED program offers practice advice for groups wanting to clean up school bus emissions and tamp down on idling, and points to an EPA primer on retrofitting tailpipes to filter emissions. The one pictured here is designed to filter particulate matter from diesel emissions.)

Even more problematic than school buses are the trucks that haul an estimated 85% of America’s goods from producers to retailers. According to the EPA, “truck and locomotive idling consumes over 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel annually.” Almost half of that amount (along with emissions of “11 million tons of carbon dioxide, 180,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 5,000 tons of particulate matter annually”) comes from “long-duration truck idling” — a fact of life for truckers who sleep in their cabs and must run engines to keep them air-conditioned or heated.

A trucker recently complained to the New York Times that with rising fuel costs, “It’s to the point where you can get a motel room cheaper than you can idle the truck.” But other alternatives to idling are gaining popularity as well: Add-ons like the Pony Pack and Mack Truck’s hybrid system help electrical systems run without engine power, while some truck stops are installing electric hookups to accomplish the same goal.

One by one, justifications for leaving cars and trucks running are being made obsolete; and bit by bit, a patchwork of laws is making drivers face that fact. Before long, even the time-honored wintertime practice of letting cars warm up for a half-hour in the morning may die a well deserved death — especially with no less an authority than Tom & Ray Magliozzi’s Car Talk explaining that the practice was “bad for the car” even back before people cared how wasteful it was.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media