(Family Features) Preserving your community for future generations can take many forms. It might mean volunteering with local organizations and participating in community improvement initiatives. Taking steps to protect the environment is another critical way to ensure your community remains safe and livable for generations to come.
These ideas show that going green can be as simple as making small modifications to everyday actions you already take.
Donating Unwanted Goods Landfills are overflowing with items that still have plenty of useful life. Often, those discarded items could be repurposed to provide an affordable option to those who can’t afford new, full-price versions. Before loading up your trash can, consider donating things like household goods and clothing that could still serve a purpose. Numerous organizations accept gently used goods that they either distribute directly to those in need or sell to the general public, with proceeds benefiting a specific cause or population. Look into the options in your area to find the best fit for items you have that can be donated.
Rethinking Transportation Pollution from transportation accounts for 29% of the United States’ emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That’s a higher percentage than any other category measured by the EPA. Carpooling, public transportation and even carefully planning your route are ways you can take personal accountability to help reduce the problem.
Another way to improve transportation emissions is by talking to your school district about its school bus choices. Diesel school buses are not only expensive to operate, but they are harmful to children’s health, the community and the climate, according to data compiled by the Propane Education & Research Council. Conversely, propane reduces harmful emissions that impact student health and air quality in the community. By advocating for your district to convert to a more environmentally friendly transportation option, such as propane, you can help further reduce harmful emissions in your community.
Find more information about propane-powered buses at BetterOurBuses.com.
Recycling and Composting Another way to reduce landfill waste is recycling and composting. Many of the items you throw away can be recycled into all-new materials. For example, recycled plastic can be used in a wide range of products, from sleeping bags and backpacks to dishes and reusable water bottles. Food waste represents a large share of landfills, too. Eventually it will biodegrade, but composting what you can at home gives you nutrient-rich material you can use to support your garden or lawn with healthier soil and less need for pesticides.
Cleaning with Natural Products Keeping your home clean takes more than a little elbow grease, but the harsh chemicals found in many household cleaners are actually quite damaging. The chemicals can be poisonous or contain allergens that negatively impact your home’s air quality. Natural cleaners are often more cost-efficient, so you can enjoy cleaner air and minimize your impact on the environment.
Taking Advantage of Natural Light If you’re in the habit of flipping on a light switch as you walk in a room, next time pause and consider whether you really need additional light. During daylight hours, many rooms offer more than enough natural light. Sunlight can also help warm spaces naturally when it’s cool outdoors, so throw open the curtains and let those warm, bright rays shine. If you do need additional light, consider relying on task lighting to illuminate your project rather than an overhead light that consumes more electricity.
Benefits of Propane School Buses
Over the last several decades, there have been many advances in student transportation. However, one area that could still use improvement is the number of students who ride to school on diesel buses that pollute the air. Today, there are two meaningful energy choices for clean student transportation: propane and electric. While both can achieve clean transportation, propane buses cost one-third the price of electric, allowing districts to replace their aging diesel fleet faster.
As an affordable, available and clean energy source, propane buses make practical sense. The buses reduce harmful emissions by 96% compared to diesel. They can also meet school districts’ needs with a range of up to 400 miles and the resiliency to continue operating across all terrains and in any weather. In fact, more than 1,000 school districts have already made the switch. Every day, 1.3 million children ride to school in 22,000 propane school buses across the country.
In 2022, the EPA introduced the Clean School Bus Program, which provides $5 billion over five years (2022-26) to replace existing diesel school buses with zero-emission and low-emission models.
Through three rounds of funding, the EPA program has allocated more than $2.8 billion for 8,427 electric school buses and 440 low-emissions propane buses. However, for the same amount of money that was distributed for the electric buses (about $2.77 billion), the program could have helped fund as many as 92,635 propane buses, assuming each propane bus received the $30,000 incentive.
Advertisement
When considering full lifecycle emissions, replacing 92,635 diesel buses with propane buses would have reduced harmful nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions by 24,664 metric tons over the three years the program has funded buses. By comparison, replacing just 8,427 diesel buses with electric buses will reduce NOx emissions by just 2,379 metric tons over the three years.
The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.
Moss Landing Battery Fire Fallout: Study Finds Toxic Metals Captured in Nearby Wetlands
After the January 2025 Moss Landing battery storage fire, researchers found nickel, manganese and cobalt particles raining onto nearby wetlands. A new study shows how toxic metals settled, spread with tides and rain, and may bioaccumulate through Elkhorn Slough’s food web—raising fresh questions about battery storage safety.
A battery energy storage facility that was built inside an old power plant burned from Jan. 16-18, 2025. Mike Takaki
Moss Landing Battery Fire Fallout: Study Finds Toxic Metals Captured in Nearby Wetlands
Ivano W. Aiello, San José State University When fire broke out at the world’s largest battery energy storage facility in January 2025, its thick smoke blanketed surrounding wetlands, farms and nearby communities on the central California coast. Highways closed, residents evacuated and firefighters could do little but watch as debris and ash rained down. People living in the area reported headaches and respiratory problems, and some pets and livestock fell ill. Two days later, officials announced that the air quality met federal safety standards. But the initial all-clear decision missed something important – heavy metal fallout on the ground.A chunk of charred battery debris found near bird tracks in the mud, with a putty knife to show the size. The surrounding marshes are popular stopovers for migrating seabirds. Scientists found a thin layer of much smaller debris across the wetlands.Ivano Aiello, et al, 2025 When battery energy storage facilities burn, the makeup of the chemical fallout can be a mystery for surrounding communities. Yet, these batteries often contain metals that are toxic to humans and wildlife. The smoke plume from the fire in Vistra’s battery energy storage facility at Moss Landing released not just hazardous gases such as hydrogen fluoride but also soot and charred fragments of burned batteries that landed for miles around. I am a marine geologist who has been tracking soil changes in marshes adjacent to the Vistra facility for over a decade as part of a wetland-restoration project. In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, my colleagues and I were able to show through detailed before-and-after samples from the marshes what was in the battery fire’s debris and what happened to the heavy metals. The batteries’ metal fragments, often too tiny to see with the naked eye, didn’t disappear. They continue to be remobilized in the environment today.The Vistra battery energy storage facility – the large gray building in the lower left, near Monterey Bay – is surrounded by farmland and marshes. The smoke plume from the fire rained ash on the area and reached four counties.Google Earth, with data from Google, Airbus, MBARI, CSUMB, CC BY
What’s inside the batteries
Moss Landing, at the edge of Monterey Bay, has long been shaped by industry – a mix of power generation and intensive agriculture on the edge of a delicate coastal ecosystem. The Vistra battery storage facility rose on the site of an old Duke Energy and PG&E gas power plant, which was once filled with turbines and oil tanks. When Vistra announced it was converting the site into the world’s largest lithium-ion battery facility, the plan was hailed as a clean energy milestone. Phase 1 alone housed batteries with 300 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about 225,000 homes for four hours. The energy in rechargeable batteries comes from the flow of electrons released by lithium atoms in the anode moving toward the cathode. In the type of batteries at the Moss Landing facility, the cathode was rich in three metals: nickel, manganese and cobalt. These batteries are prized for their high energy density and relatively low cost, but they are also prone to thermal runaway. Lab experiments have shown that burning batteries can eject metal particles like confetti.
Metals found in wetlands matched batteries
When my team and I returned to the marsh three days after the fire, ash and burned debris covered the ground. Weeks afterward, charred fragments still clung to the vegetation. Our measurements with portable X-ray fluorescence showed sharp increases in nickel, manganese and cobalt compared with data from before the fire. As soon as we saw the numbers, we alerted officials in four counties about the risk. We estimate that about 25 metric tons (55,000 pounds) of heavy metals were deposited across roughly half a square mile (1.2 square kilometers) of wetland around Elkorn Slough, and that was only part of the area that saw fallout. To put this in perspective, the part of the Vistra battery facility that burned was hosting 300 megawatts of batteries, which equates to roughly 1,900 metric tons of cathode material. Estimates of the amount of batteries that burned range from 55% to 80%. Based on those estimates, roughly 1,000 to 1,400 metric tons of cathode material could have been carried into the smoke plume. What we found in the marsh represents about 2% of what may have been released.These contour maps show how metals from the Moss Landing battery fire settled across nearby wetlands. Each color represents how much of a metal – nickel, manganese or cobalt – was found in surface soils. Darker colors mean higher concentrations. The highest levels were measured about two weeks after the fire, then declined as rain and tides dispersed the deposits.Charlie Endris We took samples at hundreds of locations and examined millimeter-thin soil slices with a scanning electron microscope. Those slices revealed metallic particles smaller than one-tenth the width of a human hair – small enough to travel long distances and lodge deep in the lungs. The ratio of nickel to cobalt in these particles matched that of nickel, manganese and cobalt battery cathodes, clearly linking the contamination to the fire. Over the following months, we found that surface concentrations of the metals dropped sharply after major rain and tidal events, but the metals did not disappear. They were remobilized. Some migrated to the main channel of the estuary and may have been flushed out into the ocean. Some of the metals that settled in the estuary could enter the food chain in this wildlife hot spot, often populated with sea otters, harbor seals, pelicans and herons.A high-magnification image of a leaf of bristly oxtongue, seen under a scanning electron microscope, shows a tiny metal particle typically used in cathode material in lithium-ion batteries, a stark reminder that much of the fallout from the fire landed on vegetation and croplands. The image’s scale is in microns: 1 micron is 0.001 millimeters.Ivano Aiello
Making battery storage safer as it expands
The fire at Moss Landing and its fallout hold lessons for other communities, first responders and the design of future lithium-ion battery systems, which are proliferating as utilities seek to balance renewable power and demand peaks. When fires break out, emergency responders need to know what they’re dealing with. A California law passed after the fire helps address this by requiring strengthening containment and monitoring at large battery installations and meetings with local fire officials before new facilities open.How lithium-ion batteries work, and why they can be prone to thermal runaway. Newer lithium-ion batteries that use iron phosphate cathodes are also considered safer from fire risk. These are becoming more common for utility-scale energy storage than batteries with nickel, manganese and cobalt, though they store less energy. How soil is tested is also important. At Moss Landing, some of the government’s sampling turned up low concentrations of the metals, likely because the samples came from broad, mixed layers that diluted the concentration of metals rather than the thin surface deposits where contaminants settled.
Continuing risks to marine life
Metals from the Moss Landing battery fire still linger in the region’s sediments and food webs. These metals bioaccumulate, building up through the food chain: The metals in marsh soils can be taken up by worms and small invertebrates, which are eaten by fish, crabs or shorebirds, and eventually by top predators such as sea otters or harbor seals. Our research group is now tracking the bioaccumulation in Elkhorn Slough’s shellfish, crabs and fish. Because uptake varies among species and seasons, the effect of the metals on ecosystems will take months or years to emerge. Ivano W. Aiello, Professor of Marine Geology, San José State University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How China cleaned up its air pollution – and what that meant for the climate
How China cleaned up its air pollution: Beijing’s air quality went from hazardous to good while Delhi and Lahore still struggle. Discover how China dramatically reduced pollution since 2013—and why cleaner air may have unintended consequences for global warming and climate change.
Delhi: 442. Lahore: 334. Beijing: 16. These are the levels of PM 2.5, one of the principle measures for air pollution, on November 19. As Pakistanis and Indians struggle with hazardous air quality, in Beijing – a city once notorious for its smog – the air quality is currently rated as good. Ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government was so concerned about pollution that it introduced temporary restrictions on cars, shut down factories and stopped work on some construction sites. The measures worked and one study later found that levels of air pollution were down 30% during the period when the temporary Olympic restrictions were in place. It would take a few more years before the Chinese government implemented a clean air action plan in 2013. Since then, China has achieved a dramatic improvement in its air quality. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Laura Wilcox, a professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the UK, to understand how China managed to clean up its air pollution. But Wilcox’s recent research uncovered some unintended consequences from this cleaner air for the global climate: the pollution was actually helping to cool the atmosphere and by taking it away, it may have accelerated global warming. Wilcox explains:
What we’re seeing is a removing of cooling that’s revealing warming that’s already there. So the air pollution isn’t the cause of the warming. It’s just letting us see stuff that we’ve already done.
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
Primo Brands and River Partners Launch Groundbreaking River Restoration Project in California
Primo Brands and River Partners to launch a nearly 1,000-acre restoration project along California’s Sacramento and Feather rivers. The initiative will generate 50,000 acre-feet of water benefits annually while restoring habitats, improving flood protection, and strengthening climate resilience for communities and ecosystems.
Before and after: An example of the transformative riverway restoration that Primo Brands and River Partners have joined forces to implement at 10 different sites along the Sacramento and Feather rivers in Northern California to generate lasting water, community, and ecosystem benefits. Credit: River Partners (CNW Group/Primo Brands Corporation)
Primo Brands and River Partners Launch Groundbreaking River Restoration Project in California
A major public-private partnership aims to conserve water, restore ecosystems, and strengthen climate resilience across the Sacramento and Feather rivers.
Tampa, Fla. & Stamford, Conn. — August 25, 2025 — Primo Brands Corporation (NYSE: PRMB), one of North America’s leading beverage companies and owner of the Arrowhead® Mountain Spring Water brand, has announced a major collaboration with River Partners, a California-based nonprofit specializing in large-scale river and floodplain restoration. The initiative represents a transformative step toward conserving water resources, restoring critical habitats, and advancing climate resilience for communities across California.
Restoring the Lifeblood of California
The project focuses on revitalizing nearly 1,000 acres along the Sacramento and Feather rivers—two waterways that form the backbone of California’s water system, supporting agriculture, biodiversity, and millions of residents. Over the next three years, River Partners will restore 10 multi-benefit floodplain sites with support from Primo Brands’ financial investment.
The restoration is expected to deliver nearly 50,000 acre-feet of volumetric water benefits (VWBs) each year, equivalent to more than 16 billion gallons of water—roughly what 500,000 Californians consume annually.
Beyond water conservation, the initiative will:
Reconnect rivers to floodplains to improve groundwater recharge.
Restore salmon spawning and rearing habitats in degraded river corridors.
Enhance biodiversity and protect endangered species.
Improve flood protection for vulnerable communities.
Renew Tribal access to culturally significant natural resources.
Corporate Commitment to Water Stewardship
“At Primo Brands, our mission is to Hydrate a Healthy America™,” said Charles Fogg, Chief Sustainability Officer at Primo Brands. “Collaborating with River Partners allows us to advance our water replenishment goal of helping to restore 100% of water used or displaced by our operations in high-priority watersheds facing shared water challenges.”
River Partners President Julie Rentner emphasized the significance of the collaboration:
“The Sacramento and Feather rivers are the lifeblood of California’s water system. This partnership will not only yield measurable water benefits but also provide critical improvements for endangered species, flood protection, Tribal access, and public health through restored lands.”
A Model for Nature-Based Solutions
The effort underscores the growing role of nature-based solutions in tackling water scarcity and climate change. With one of the largest restoration footprints in the western U.S., River Partners will apply decades of experience to ensure measurable and scalable outcomes.
Advertisement
By aligning private investment with nonprofit expertise, Primo Brands and River Partners are demonstrating a replicable model for safeguarding California’s most critical water supplies.
About the Partners
Primo Brands is a North American leader in healthy hydration, with a diverse portfolio of trusted bottled water brands including Poland Spring®, Pure Life®, Saratoga®, Mountain Valley®, Arrowhead®, Deer Park®, Ice Mountain®, Ozarka®, and Zephyrhills®. The company manages over 80 springs, actively conserves more than 28,000 acres of land, and delivers hydration solutions to homes, businesses, and retail outlets across the U.S. and Canada. Learn more.
River Partners, founded in 1998, is the leading nonprofit dedicated to restoring California’s rivers and floodplains. Its large-scale projects—spanning nearly 20,000 acres statewide—combine farming techniques, ecological science, and community collaboration to advance climate resiliency, biodiversity, and water conservation. Learn more.
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
Pollution from transportation accounts for 29% of the United States’ emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That’s a higher percentage than any other category measured by the EPA. Carpooling, public transportation and even carefully planning your route are ways you can take personal accountability to help reduce the problem.
Over the last several decades, there have been many advances in student transportation. However, one area that could still use improvement is the number of students who ride to school on diesel buses that pollute the air. Today, there are two meaningful energy choices for clean student transportation: propane and electric. While both can achieve clean transportation, propane buses cost one-third the price of electric, allowing districts to replace their aging diesel fleet faster.
