Yellow -- and green

More than half of Anoka-Hennepin schools' buses started running greener on the first day of school this year.

In an effort to reduce tailpipe emissions spewed into neighborhoods, and to clean up the air in the buses themselves, the district and its two transportation contractors -- First Student and Kottke's Bus Service -- had pollution control devices fitted on 172 of the district's 300 buses.

"It cleans up the environment for everybody involved, from the district employees to the communities we travel in to the people in the school buildings," said Keith Paulson, the district's transportation director. "It's a good thing."

The cost is also a good thing -- it's free.

Anoka-Hennepin is among the most recent school districts to sign up for Project Green Fleet, an initiative that uses public grants and private donations to fit school buses with pollution control devices, at no cost to the schools. The devices cut bus pollution emissions by half, officials say.

The Minnesota Environmental Initiative, a consortium of public and private groups, kicked off the project in 2005. By the end of this year, 1,200 school buses in Minnesota will have either been fitted with the anti-pollution devices or scheduled for the modifications, said Bill Droessler, the initiative's director of environmental projects.

"The first benefit is emissions reductions, which are about 50 percent per bus," Droessler said. "But you also get enormous health benefits, especially for the drivers and the kids on these buses."

"We're been careful about that," he said. "It isn't a Chicken Little-the-sky-is-falling situation."

The Minnesota Environmental Initiative pays for the estimated $2,000 cost per bus to install two pieces of equipment. One controls emissions coming out of the tailpipe. The other is called a "closed crankcase emissions system," which is fitted in the engine compartment and controls emissions from the engine itself.

The goal of Project Green Fleet is to install the pollution-control devices on the 4,000 school buses in Minnesota that are eligible for such modifications, Droessler said. Some buses -- older ones, for instance -- don't lend themselves to the retrofitting.

Among the districts that are using the Project Green Fleet modifications are Eden Prairie, Edina, Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan, North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale, Houston, Crosby-Ironton, Bemidji, and Minneapolis, according to Project Green Fleet tallies. A number of school bus companies also are participating in the initiative.

Droessler said the initiative is already working with some counties and cities -- Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Washington County among them -- to clean up their big, diesel-burning trucks and is looking for more grants and donations to do more.

The new pollution-control devices don't affect the performance of the buses, he said. Any discernible impact on riders and drivers will probably be subtle, only truly noticeable when they get on buses without such controls.

He explained: "It's something like, if you go into a restaurant and people are smoking and you're not usually around it, all of a sudden you realize, 'Boy, I'm glad I'm not around smoking.'"