Echo

Green Gridirons: Ohio State University

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A football stadium may have green grass but does it have green habits? Each week, Great Lakes Echo highlights a Big Ten football stadium’s attempts to do the most to impact the environment the least. All schools have information on the stadium’s diversion rate – the amount of waste recycled instead of put in a landfill. Stadium: Ohio Stadium

School: Ohio State University

Built: 1922

Capacity: 102,329

2012 diversion rate: 87.2 percent

Scouting report: Ohio State claims to have the largest stadium to have achieved zero waste, something that requires a 90 percent diversion rate or more. Ohio Stadium’s highest diversion rate was 98.2 percent, against Illinois on Nov.

Wildlife

Michigan officials seek to regulate carrier pigeons

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by Lacee Shepard

Local officials could restrict ownership of carrier pigeons on a community—by-community basis under a new Michigan proposal. Sen. Hoon-Yung Hopgood , D-Taylor, introduced a bill that would allow cities and townships to decide their own restrictions on carrier pigeons. The bill began after Hopgood received a constituent complaint about a neighbor owning too many carrier pigeons. “We thought we should give the cities the ability to do what make sense for a given community,” Hopgood said. “Then they can look out for the health and welfare of local residents.”

The proposal wouldn’t allow a local ban on the bird but would allow local governments to impose a limit on ownership if they see fit, Hopgood said.

Waste

Green Gridirons: University of Michigan

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A football stadium may have green grass but does it have green habits? Each week, Great Lakes Echo highlights a Big Ten football stadium’s attempts to do the most to impact the environment the least. All schools have information on the stadium’s diversion rate – the amount of waste recycled instead of put in a landfill. Stadium: Michigan Stadium (“The Big House”)

School: University of Michigan

Built: 1927

Capacity: 107,521

2012 diversion rate: 22.7 percent. Scouting report: Recycling efforts at the stadium began almost 20 years ago in 1994, and the University of Michigan currently has the biggest stadium recycling program in the nation.

Echo

Report: Great Lakes ill-equipped to ship tar sands safely

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As the tar sands industry continues to grow, a pressing issue is finding ways to transport the crude oil to midwest refineries. Some are hoping to ship tar sands across the Great Lakes, while others fear another disaster like the Kalamazoo spill.

Echo

Big lakes, big sound

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Folks in our neck of the woods tend to be a bit biased regarding big lakes. That’s understandable when 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water flows through our region.  But are North America’s lakes the greatest of lakes? That depends on how you measure. Lake Superior has a surface area of 31,700 square miles dwarfing Siberia’s Lake Baikal’s mere 12,248 square miles. But at 25 million years old and with a depth of 5,600 feet (Lake Superior is only 1,330 feet deep), Lake Baikal is the oldest, deepest lake in the world.

Echo

Great Lakes Month in Review: Asian carp and petcoke

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Current State checks in monthly with Great Lakes commentator and journalist Gary Wilson for updates on environmental stories from around the basin. For today’s Great Lakes Month in Review, we’re focusing on petcoke piles and Asian carp.

Air

A drone is still a drone by any other name

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We’re always on the look out for innovative stories and reporting techniques at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. In a couple weeks we’ll launch a series on civilian applications of drones for gathering information about the environment. I teach a course encompassing remote sensing, including the use of drones, as newsgathering tools. So a story in the print edition of the New York Times, Drones Offer Journalists a Wider View, caught my eye at Monday’s breakfast table. It’s an interesting enough piece about a controversial technology.