·:[ Environmental News Bits ]:·
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Read the full story in the Roanoke Times.

The environment remains a newsmaker from here to Beijing.

Demand for the Toyota Prius is up. China is trying to reduce its air pollution (for next month’s Olympics, at least).

And in Salem, to coordinate campus efforts to protect the environment, Roanoke College has formed a Green Advisory Committee.

On its list of duties? To be a clearinghouse for ecology issues and to advise President Michael Maxey and his Cabinet.

Green initiatives have happened independently so far, making them harder to track, explained Teresa Gereaux, a college spokeswoman and committee member.

Read the press release.

Converted Organics Inc.  announced today that the company has formed an innovative partnership with the city of Gonzales, CA and the Gonzales Unified School District to recycle food waste from local school cafeterias into all-natural organic fertilizer for application on Gonzales school fields, city parks and public spaces. The recycling program will begin in mid-August to coincide with the start of the school year. The fertilizer will be made using Converted Organics’ proprietary technology and process known as High Temperature Liquid Composting (HTLC).

Read the full story in the Syracuse Post-Standard.

A Fayetteville-Manlius High School teacher has turned her two passions into a fundraising effort for Syracuse city school students..

Stewart is collecting granola and energy bar wrappers and sending them to TerraCycle’s Energy Bar Brigade. The program will recycle and reuse the wrappers and donate 2 cents for each one to b.i.k.e. Syracuse, a mentoring program that matches city students with ride leaders and bicycles.

Read the full story in the Nova Scotia News.

The grass where Bobby slept gleams green.

And the rain that washed him clean a few evenings earlier has dried into a cool May morning.

Sunlight shimmers off Maynard Lake, motorists head to work, and the 59-year-old — awakened by sniffing dogs and people’s voices — wheels his crowded shopping cart past the water.

Wind whips his long blond hair, bouncing with the music blasting from his battery-operated boom box.

And the clothes he gathered from the garbage billow in the hard breeze.

His sunglasses, missing a lens, expose one blazing blue eye rimmed by a golden frame.

Those eyes can spot things — shiny pop cans, sunlit water bottles — from far away, a valuable talent when trash is a treasure.

Read the full story in the Wenatchee World.

Larry Stoltz, owner of L&L Engineering, has been making biodiesel at his Peshastin shop with members of a loose-knit cooperative for the past four years. Tuesday, he led a tour of his ramshackle operation for six teenage members of a local 4-H Forestry Education summer program. Earlier in the day the group worked at a Leavenworth organic farm that uses biodiesel fuel in its tractors and logging equipment.

Read the full story in Biomass Magazine.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England, are looking at whether an everyday bioprocess that occurs naturally might be harnessed to produce hydrogen on a commercial scale using sugary food waste as a feedstock.

Read the full story in Biomass Magazine.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has released a 50-page document containing guidelines for harvesting woody biomass for alternative energy sources.