Back to—cough!—School

Vegetarian Times, Sept, 2005

Children on school buses breathe more heavily polluted air than pedestrians on nearby sidewalks, say researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. Exhaust that leaks from the engine into the passenger areas of the buses is 70 times more polluted than even the air that a Los Angeles resident inhales.

That's because the fumes inside the buses never pass through "scrubbers" that filter out pollutants before the exhaust is released, the researchers report in the March 16, 2005 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology. "I would expect that lawmakers would be quite interested in doing something about this," lead researcher Julian D. Marshall, a Berkeley doctoral student, tells VT. So far, however, he has yet to hear from a single politician seeking further information.