The Engine in These School Buses Could Improve Kids’ Test Scores

Each weekday for most of the year, hundreds of thousands of school buses criss-cross their way through America. Every school day, the hulking monoliths transport nearly 26 million children, or about 55% of the student population, and travel over 4 billion miles annually. This makes the national school bus fleet the largest form of mass transportation in the U.S. — bigger than that of commercial buses, trains and airplanes combined. 
The yellow school bus might be one of the most iconic and ubiquitous symbols of childhood, but intertwined with that nostalgia is an ugly reality. For almost as long as school buses have been around, the children inside of them have been breathing in toxic fumes that can have dire consequences not just for their respiratory health, but for their brain development as well. 
In a new study, researchers from Georgia State University compared the standardized test scores of kids who rode old, dirtier diesel buses to those who commuted in buses with engines that had been modified, or retrofitted, to filter out up to 95% of harmful pollutants. Looking at test results from 2007 to 2015, they found a significant increase in English scores and smaller, but notable, gains in math scores  among bus-riding kids whose districts retrofitted their bus engines. 
For cash-strapped school districts, buying newer buses that adhere to the government’s stricter diesel regulations, enacted in 2007, can be out of reach, even with the medley of rebates and grants awarded each year under the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act and through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus program
But there is another solution that is often overlooked, say the researchers — a fix that not only protects young brains but is also a cost-effective way of decreasing absentee rates and improving test scores, which in turn increases lifetime earnings.
Diesel retrofits are engine modifications that can filter out up to 95% of harmful pollutants. At an average cost of $8,000 per engine, it’s a much cheaper option than buying newer buses that burn cleaner, ultra-low sulfur diesel, which can run a school upward of $130,000 apiece (the price jumps to about $360,000 for a propane-fueled or electric-powered bus). Currently, only an estimated 40% of all fleets run on the lower-emission diesel technology; the majority are still spewing known carcinogens. 

‘LIKE A BRAIN FOG’

Though the respiratory dangers from emissions of diesel fuel have long been known, researchers are just beginning to understand the impact on the brain, which can have both short- and long-term effects. Particularly worrisome are the microscopic soot particles, known as particulate matter, that when inhaled can burrow deep inside a person’s lungs and enter the bloodstream. For kids, whose internal systems are much smaller and still developing, the effects are even more pronounced.
The evidence that soot and other toxins in high-sulfur diesel lead to lasting brain effects is building, said Jimmy O’Dea, a senior vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit research organization. 
“The scientific literature is really showing, with study after study, nearly every organ system in the body is at risk from higher exposure to particulate matter,” O’Dea told NationSwell. “Everything from the lung diseases that you might typically associate with bad air quality to heart and neurological diseases are being found to increase health risks from more exposure to these pollutants.”

school buses
Until 2007, school buses ran on older diesel technology laden with pollutants that have been shown to trigger asthma in children and affect their cognitive functioning.

Initially the Georgia State researchers set out to only look at students’ aerobic health using data from Georgia’s statewide fitness assessments. But at the time, Wes Austin, one of the study’s co-authors, had been sifting through other research on the effects of air pollution when a study linking it to dementia caught his eye. “I just happened to have a lot of state education data sitting around, so it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch to look at test scores too,” he said, adding, “but I didn’t think the study would go where it did.”
Austin described how the cocktail of toxins in diesel exhaust can cripple a young mind. “There’s a same-day effect, where carbon monoxide and other things that decrease your blood’s oxygen level can make you feel a little bit out of it, like a brain fog,” said Austin. “But in the long term, particulate matter PM2.5 is small enough that when you breathe it in, it passes through your nasal cavity and into your brain, and leads to white-matter lesions and inflammation.” 
The result, he said, “interferes with your neurons’ ability to communicate properly.”

DIESEL DINOSAURS

Unlike other behemoth diesel-burners on the roads, such as commercial trucks and mass-transit buses, school buses have been slow to embrace new technology. Between 2012 and 2018, for example, the EPA awarded $39 million in rebates to replace nearly 2,000 buses across the country; this year, it’s on track to replace an additional 473 buses. Considering that there are more than 470,000 school buses on the road, that’s little more than a drop in the proverbial bucket.
“It’s a question of funding and school districts making it a priority,” said Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, a nonprofit advocacy group. He noted that even as alternative-powered buses are getting more attention from the media and from the government — a new bill to replace old diesel buses with new electric ones was recently introduced in the Senate — 95% of school buses continue to burn diesel fuel. “It’s still the overwhelming dominant technology,” he said.
Though Americans by and large prefer cars that run on gasoline, the historical choice of diesel for school bus fleets made sense for two reasons. “First and foremost was safety,” Schaeffer said. “If a school bus gets rammed by a car, the risk of fire would be greater with gasoline than diesel because diesel is less likely to ignite under those kind of circumstances.”
Second is simple economics. When deciding where to put their dollars, school districts often don’t prioritize transportation, even as the proliferation of school choice and charter schools have caused bus routes to get longer and more children outside of districts are accommodated. And, as Schaeffer pointed out, applying for state and federal rebates to upgrade diesel buses is a competitive process.
With limited funds, schools often deprioritize transportation, he said. “They’re asking themselves, ‘Should I spend the dollars to get them to school in a fancier bus? Or should I spend the dollars in the classroom or to reduce the ratio of teachers to students?’ Those are the kind of questions that these districts are looking at.” 

SMALL INVESTMENT, BIG IMPACT

Austin and his fellow Georgia State researchers looked at that question too. They found that paying for diesel-engine retrofits — in lieu of shelling out for brand-new buses — is a highly cost-effective way to preserve brain and lung health and improve academic achievement.
The research team carried out back-of-envelope calculations regarding the costs and benefits of bus retrofits. They looked at data from an earlier study that linked smaller class sizes to improvements in test scores and higher lifetime earnings. Reducing a classroom by seven students was found to cost about $870 per student. In contrast, the Georgia State researchers estimated that retrofitting a bus costs roughly $122 per student rider.
“Reducing class size by hiring more teachers is expensive,” said Austin. In fact, his study concluded that to see the same test-score gains, a district would need to spend anywhere from three to five times as much on class-size reductions than it would on bus retrofits. What’s more, the researchers found that “if a district retrofits its entire bus fleet, the effect on English test scores would be slightly larger than the effect of going from a rookie teacher to one with five years of experience.”
Diesel school buses were built to last a long time, as Schaeffer pointed out, and eventually the older, dirtier pre-2007 models still on the road will break down or be phased out. But until then, schools have a relatively cheap win-win available: the chance to improve overall student health and boost their chances for lifelong success.
More: The Diesel-Chugging Yellow School Bus Finally Goes Green
 

5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Let Your Car’s Engine Idle

It might not seem like a big deal to leave your car’s engine on while waiting to pick someone up, but did you know it’s better for you and the environment if you simply turned the car off?
There’s a common misconception that it takes more gas to restart your car than to keep it running — but that’s simply not true. In fact, if you’re going to idle more than 10 seconds, it’s better to switch off the engine and restart it when you’re ready to go.
As Sustainable America points out, idling is “a crucial economic, health, and environmental issue” and changing this bad driving habit can make a big difference. EcoWatch recently pointed out 10 excellent reasons why you should turn off an idling car, and here are some of our favorites:
1. Get more miles out of your tank
The average American spends 16 minutes a day idling their vehicle, according to this infographic. While you shouldn’t turn off your car in the middle of the road or stopped at an intersection, EcoWatch writes that, for example, “if you idle for five minutes warming up your car in the morning, three minutes at the bank drive-thru and four minutes listening to the end of an NPR story in your driveway, you’ve burned enough gas to drive 24 miles.”
2. Save money
The Ohio Air Quality Development Authority found that the average idle car consumes about 0.156 gallons of gas per hour. Even though that doesn’t sound like a lot, Slate crunched the numbers and found that if you were to cut 10 minutes of idling a day and restart your car four more times a day as a result, you could save around 8.9 gallons of gas a year. Based on today’s gas prices, that’s an extra $30 you get to keep in your pocket. Multiplied by every driver in the U.S., the country as a whole could save about $13 million annually, EcoWatch reports.
3. You could be breaking the law
Idle car bans already exist in about 30 states. In New York state, for example, heavy-duty vehicles (such as diesel trucks and buses) cannot be idle for more than five minutes at a time. In New York City, the anti-idling rule goes even further: cars, taxicabs and buses can not idle outside of the city’s schools for more than a minute because exhaust fumes worsen the quality of air both inside and outside the school, CNN reported.
4. Better air quality
We’ve mentioned before that half of the toxic pollutants in the air are caused by petroleum-chugging motor vehicles. And when your car is idling, it emits just as many harmful emissions as a car on the go. “Every 10 minutes of idling you cut from your life, you’ll save one pound of carbon dioxide — a harmful greenhouse gas — from being released into the atmosphere,” EcoWatch writes.
5. Improved health
Air pollution is linked to asthma attacks, lung disease, allergies, even cancer. Because a lot of idling happens around fast-food drive thrus, the EPA even warned via a tweet to avoid them entirely:  “Although convenient, the idling of your car worsens air quality for you and your kids.” No idling = Better air = Happy lungs

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DON’T MISS: 5 Very Simple, Practical Things You Can Do to Curb Climate Change

Despite Reports About Increasing Environmental Hazards, the Air in Our Cities is Getting Much Safer to Breathe

For all the hot air we often hear from politicians and pundits alike, the quality of the air we breathe in this country has actually gotten a lot better in the last two decades.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently released their Second Integrated Urban Air Toxics Report to Congress, which surprisingly, shows that a lot of progress has been made to reduce harmful pollutants in cities due to the Clean Air Act updates from 1990, reports Think Progress.
Some highlights in the report include:
– A 66 percent reduction in benzene
– A nearly 60 percent reduction in mercury from man-made sources like coal-fired power plants
– An 84 percent decrease of lead in outdoor air, which slows brain development in children
– The removal of an estimated 1.5 million tons per year of air toxics like arsenic, benzene, lead and nickel from stationary sources
– Another 1.5 million tons per year (about 50 percent) of air toxics from mobile sources. This is significant because air toxics (also referred to as hazardous air pollutants or HAPs) are known or suspected of causing cancer and can damage the immune, respiratory, neurological, reproductive and developmental systems
– Approximately 3 million tons per year of criteria pollutants, like particulate matter and sulfur dioxide, have been reduced as co-benefits of air toxics reductions
MORE: Do Ants Hold the Key to Reducing Pollution?
And if you think the EPA is just tooting it’s own horn, NASA also studied satellite images from 2005 to present day and saw physical proof that air pollution is decreasing in major urban areas.
Not only is cleaner air good news for our health, it’s good for the economy, too. CNN reports that better air quality prevented 160,000 deaths in 2010, 1.7 million asthma attacks and cut down hospital admissions and emergency room visits by 86,000. By 2020, the dollar savings in cleaner air will amount to $2 trillion annually in alleviated health risks.
In a statement, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy emphasizes that strict environmental regulations do not hinder this country’s economic growth: “This report gives everyone fighting for clean air a lot to be proud of because for more than 40 years we have been protecting Americans — preventing illness and improving our quality of life by cutting air pollution — all while the economy has more than tripled.”
“But we know our work is not done yet,” McCarthy notes. “At the core of EPA’s mission is the pursuit of environmental justice — striving for clean air, water and healthy land for every American; and we are committed to reducing remaining pollution, especially in low-income neighborhoods.”
So yes, while this is a small victory for all of our lungs, we shouldn’t breathe easy just yet.
DON’T MISS: This Student-Invented Device Eliminates Almost All of the Emissions from a Very Common Household Polluter

This Student-Invented Device Eliminates Almost All of the Emissions from a Very Common Household Polluter

Without a doubt, the only thing that’s green about lawns is its color.
We’ve already gone on a long tirade about this expensive and resource-intensive crop, but did you know that simply mowing your grass once a week comes at a hefty environmental price?
Here’s why: The typical gasoline-powered lawnmower is a huge, filthy polluter. The EPA estimates that in a single hour, these mowers emit 11 times the air pollution of a new car that’s driven in the same amount of time. That’s something that the planet — and our lungs — shouldn’t have to go through just for a nice patch of green. (Unless you own an electric mower, of course!)
That’s where NOx-Out comes in. It’s a one-of-a-kind device from the student engineers at the University of California-Riverside (UCR). By fitting this L-shaped pipe over a regular mower’s muffler, it significantly cuts emissions from lawnmowers more than 90 percent. According to a UCR press release, when an earlier version of the NOx-Out was tested, it cut carbon monoxide by 87 percent; nitrogen oxides by 67 percent and particulate matter by 44 percent. In the current version, 93 percent of particulate matter emissions were eliminated.
The device, which won a huge grant from the EPA’s P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet) competition, works in a three-step process, UCR says. “First, a glass quartz filter captures particulate matter. Then an ultra-fine spray of urea solution is dispersed into the exhaust stream. The urea spray primes the dirty air for the final stage, when a catalyst converts the harmful nitrogen oxide and ammonia into harmless nitrogen gas and water and releases them into the air.”
MORE: Why New Farm and Construction Equipment Will Improve Air Quality and Save Lives
The idea for the NOx-Out came from team member Rosalva Chavez, a UCR environmental engineering student. Chavez suspected that her janitor father, who earned extra money mowing lawns over the weekend, had developed coughing and asthma due to his exposure to emissions via gasoline-powered lawn equipment.
The best news about this story? As TreeHugger found, the UCR campus will be using these devices on their own lawns, and eventually, the entire University of California system could benefit from cleaner air, thanks to the NOx-Out.
UCR says that team is also thinking about commercializing the product once it’s further refined — selling for about $30 each. When 80 percent of Americans live in a home with a lawn, that’s a small price to pay to help out the planet.
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