(MI) Grand Rapids Press – The quest for cheaper, cleaner energy has city and school officials partnering with United Solar Ovonic LLC on a $36 million project to convert their facilities to solar power.

(MI) Bay City Times – Anyone who’s ever stepped into a portable toilet knows what it’s like inside on a hot day. Local leaders are turning to solar power to freshen things up in Bay County’s Bangor Township.

(MI) Kalamazoo Gazette – You can’t be too safe swimming in Lake Michigan. That’s the message South Haven officials are sending to residents and visitors of this popular resort town.

(MI) Booth Newspapers – Charles Poat is an architect and senior project manager with the Mannik & Smith Group in Canton. He’s also chairperson of the Detroit Regional Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council.

How do we know? Well, you’re reading the Great Lakes Echo. And Chicago-based Valerie Denney Communications just named Echo one of the top places to follow Great Lakes restoration.
Pretty good for less than two months on the web. Not that we’re getting a big head about it. The other sources of Great Lakes regional news listed here put us in with pretty good company. Check them out.

By Theresa Gasinski, gasinsk1@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
May 21, 2009
The Michigan Legislature may soon create a fund to loan schools money to build windmills, solar panels or other sources of alternative energy.
Elsewhere in the Great Lakes region, lawmakers in Illinois and New York have introduced similar legislation.
Some ideas within the Michigan bills to integrate wind energy into schools were written by Cory Connolly, an international relations junior at Michigan State University. Connolly is senior fellow for energy and the environment at the MSU Roosevelt Institution, a public policy research group that …

(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – The public will have a chance to comment Wednesday night on a controversial study that clears the Army Corps of Engineers of allegations that a botched dredging job in the 1960s permanently lowered Lakes Michigan and Huron.
But what people attending the hearing in Evanston, Ill., won’t get to see is a second report that contradicts the new study’s findings.

(ON) The Toronto Star – The plastics industry is warning consumers that reusable fabric grocery bags can create a health risk because they can become contaminated with fungus and bacteria if not properly washed.

(MI) The Detroit News – If you eat, sleep or waste in Detroit, or Royal Oak or a dozen other local municipalities, chances are good your garbage will be shipped to the heart of this city where it will be incinerated and converted into steam, electricity and exhaust fumes that will be recycled into some citizen’s lungs.

(MI) The Detroit News – There isn’t much that’s tropical about Krystale Houston’s West Detroit neighborhood so, for her, the beach at Belle Isle Park is a real escape. In the summers, she and her friends try to get there every other day or so for swimming and sunning.